The thought of winter is bleak and barren to our mind; the late year is
chary of aesthetic as of all other food. In the country it does not bring
ugliness; but it terribly reduces and simplifies things, depriving them
of two-thirds of their beauty. In sweeping away the last yellow leaves,
the last crimson clouds, and in bleaching the last green grass, it
effaces a whole wealth of colour. It deprives us still more by actually
diminishing the number of forms: for what summer had left rich, various,
complex, winter reduces to blank uniformity. There is a whole world of
lovely things, shapes and tints, effects of light, colour, and
perspective in a wood, as long as it is capriciously divided into a
thousand nooks and crannies by projecting boughs, bushes, hedges, and
hanging leaves; and this winter clears away and reduces to a
Haussmanized simplicity of plan. There is a smaller world, yet one quite
big enough for a summer's day, in any hay field, among the barren oats,
the moon-daisies, the seeded grasses, the sorrel, the buttercups, all
making at a distance a wonderful blent effect of luminous brown and
lilac and russet foamed with white; and forming, when you look close
into it, an unlimited forest of delicately separate stems and bloom and
seed; every plant detaching itself daintily from an undefinable
background of things like itself. This winter turns into a rusty brown
and green expanse, or into a bog, or a field of frozen upturned clods.
The very trees, stripped of their leaves, look as if prepared for
diagrams of the abstraction tree. Everything, in short, is reduced most
philosophically to its absolutely ultimate elements; and beauty is got
rid of almost as completely as by a metaphysical definition. This
aesthetic barrenness of winter is most of all felt in southern climates,
to which it brings none of the harsh glitter and glamour of snow and
ice; but leaves the frozen earth and leafless trees merely bare, without
the crisp sheen of snow, the glint and glimmer of frost and icicles,
forming for the denuded rigging of branches a fantastic system of ropes
and folded sails. In the South, therefore, unless you go where winter
never comes, and autumn merely merges into a lengthened spring, winter
is more than ever negative, dreary, barren to our fancy. Yet even this
southern winter gives one things, very lovely things: things which one
scarcely notices perhaps, yet which would baffle the most skilled
painter to imitate, the most skilled poet to describe. Thus, for
instance, there is a peculiar kind of morning by no means uncommon in
Tuscany in what is completely winter, not a remnant of autumn or a
beginning of spring. It is cold, but windless; the sky full of sun, the
earth full of mist. Sun and mist uniting into a pale luminousness in
which all things lose body, become mere outline; bodiless hills taking
shape where they touch the sky with their curve; clear line of irregular
houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the
separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal
than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as
vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the
intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours
have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet;
and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells up into the sky as
something real, but fluid and of infinite elasticity. All in front the
plain is white with mist; or pinkish grey with the unseen agglomeration
of bare tree boughs and trunks, of sere field; till, nearer us, the
trees become more visible, the short vinebearing elms in the fields,
interlacing their branches compressed by distance, the clumps of
poplars, so scant and far between from nearly, so serried and compact
from afar; and between them an occasional flush, a tawny vapour of the
orange twigged osiers; and then, still nearer, the expanse of sere
field, of mottled, crushed-together, yellowed grass and grey brown
leaves; things of the summer which winter is burying to make room for
spring. Along the reaches of the river the clumps of leafless poplars
are grey against the pale, palest blue sky; grey but with a warmth of
delicate brown, almost of rosiness. Grey also the shingle in the river
bed; the river itself either (if after rain) pale brown, streaked with
pale blue sky reflections; or (after a drought), low, grey, luminous
throughout its surface, you might think, were it not that the metallic
sheen, the vacillating sparkles of where the sun, smiting down, frets it
into a shifting mass of scintillating facets, gives you the impression
that this other luminousness of silvery water must be dull and dead.
And, looking up the river, it gradually disappears, its place marked
only, against the all-pervading pale blue haze, by the brownish grey
spectre of the furthest poplar clumps.
This, I have said, is an effect which winter produces, nay, even a
southern winter, with those comparatively few and slight elements at its
disposal. We see it, notice it, and enjoy its delicate loveliness; but
while so doing we do not think, or we forget, that the habit of
noticing, nay, the power of perceiving such effects as this, is one of
those habits and powers which we possess, so to speak, only since
yesterday. The possibility of reproducing in painting effects like this
one; or, more truthfully, the wish to reproduce them, is scarcely as old
as our own century; it is, perhaps, the latest born of all our artistic
wishes and possibilities. But the possibility of any visible effect
being perceived and reproduced by the painter, usually precedes--at
least where any kind of pictorial art already exists--the perception of
such effects by those who are not painters, and the attempt to reproduce
them by means of words. We do not care to admit that our grandfathers
were too unlike ourselves, lest ourselves should be found too unlike our
grandchildren. We hold to the metaphysic fiction of man having always
been the same, and only his circumstances having changed; not admitting
that the very change of circumstances implies something new in the man
who altered them; and similarly we shrink from the thought of the many
things which we used never to notice, and which it has required a class
of men endowed with special powers of vision to find out, copy, and
teach us to see and appreciate. Yet there is scarcely one of us who has
not a debt towards some painter or writer for first directing his
attention to objects or effects which may have abounded around him, but
unnoticed or confused with others. The painters, as I have said, the men
who see more keenly and who study what they have seen, naturally come
first; nor does the poet usually describe what his contemporary painter
attempts not to paint. An exception might, perhaps, require to be made
for Dante, who would seem to have seen and described many things left
quite untouched by Giotto, and even by Raphael; but in estimating Dante
we must be careful to distinguish the few touches which really belong to
him, from the great mass of colour and detail which we have
unconsciously added thereto, borrowing from our own experience and from
innumerable pictures and poems which, at the moment, we may not in the
least remember; and having done so, we shall be led to believe that
those words which suggest to us so clear and coloured a vision of scenes
often complex and uncommon, presented to his own mind only a
comparatively simple and incomplete idea: the atmospheric effects,
requiring a more modern painter than Turner, which we read between the
lines of the "Inferno" and the "Purgatorio," most probably existed as
little for Dante as they did for Giotto; the poet seeing and describing
in reality only salient forms of earth and rock, monotonous in tint and
deficient in air, like those in the backgrounds of mediaeval Tuscan
frescoes and panels. Be this as it may, the fact grows daily on me that
men have not at all times seen in the same degree the nature which has
always equally surrounded them; and that during some periods they have,
for explicable reasons, seen less not only than their successors, but
also than their predecessors; and seen that little in a manner
conventional in proportion to its monotony. There are things about which
certain historic epochs are strangely silent; so much so, indeed, that
the breaking of the silence impresses us almost as the more than human
breaking of a spell; and that silence Is the result of a grievous wrong,
of a moral disease which half closes the eyes of the fancy, or of a
moral poison which presents to those sorely aching eyes only a glimmer
amid darkness. And it is as the most singular instance of such
conditions that I should wish to study, in themselves, their causes and
effects, the great differences existing between the ancients and
ourselves on the one hand, and the men of the genuine Middle Ages on the
other, in the degree of interest taken respectively by each in external
nature, the seasons and that rural life which seems to bring us into
closest contact with them both.
There is, of course, a considerable difference between the manner in
which the country, its aspects and occupations, are treated by the poets
of Antiquity and by those of our own day; in the mode of enjoying them
of an ancient who had read Theocritus and Virgil and Tibullus, and a
modern whose mind is unconsciously full of the influence of Wordsworth
or Shelley or Ruskin. But it is a mere difference of mode; and is not
greater, I think, than the difference between the descriptions in the
"Allegro," and the descriptions in "Men and Women;" than the difference
between the love of our Elizabethans for the minuter details of the
country, the flowers by the stream, the birds in the bushes, the
ferrets, frogs, lizards, and similar small creatures; and the pleasure
of our own contemporaries in the larger, more shifting, and perplexing
forms and colours of cloud, sunlight, earth, and rock. The description
of effects such as these latter ones, nay, the attention and
appreciation given to them, are things of our own century, even as is
the power and desire of painting them. Landscape, in the sense of our
artists of to-day, is a very recent thing; so recent that even in the
works of Turner, who was perhaps the earliest landscape painter in the
modern sense, we are forced to separate from the real rendering of real
effects, a great deal in which the tints of sky and sea are arranged and
distributed as a mere vast conventional piece of decoration. Nor could
it be otherwise. For, in poetry as in painting, landscape could become a
separate and substantive art only when the interest in the mere ins and
outs of human adventure, in the mere structure and movement of human
limbs, had considerably diminished. There is room, in epic or drama,
only for such little scraps of description as will make clearer, without
checking, the human action; as there is place, in a fresco of a miracle,
or a little picture of carousing and singing bacchantes and Venetian
dandies, only for such little bits of laurel grove, or dim plain, or
blue alpine crags, as can be introduced in the gaps between head and
head, or figure and figure.
Thus, therefore, a great difference must exist between what would be
felt and written about the country and the seasons by an ancient, by a
man of the sixteenth century, or by a contemporary of our own: a
difference, however, solely of mode; for we feel sure that of the three
men each would find something to delight himself and wherewith to
delight others among the elm-bounded English meadows, the fiat
cornfields of central France, the vine and olive yards of Italy--
wherever, in short, he might find himself face to face and, so to
speak, hand in hand with Nature. But about the man of the Middle Ages
(unless, perhaps, in Italy, where the whole Middle Ages were merely an
earlier Renaissance) we could have no such assurance; nay, we might be
persuaded that, however great his genius, be he even a Gottfried von
Strassburg, or a Walther von der Vogelweide, or the unknown Frenchman
who has left us "Aucassin et Nicolette," he would bring back impressions
only of two things, authorized and consecrated by the poetic routine of
his contemporaries--of spring and of the woods.
There is nothing more characteristic of mediaeval poetry than this
limitation. Of autumn, of winter; of the standing corn, the ripening
fruit of summer; of all these things so dear to the ancients and to all
men of modern times, the Middle Ages seem to know nothing. The autumn
harvests, the mists and wondrous autumnal transfiguration of the
humblest tree, or bracken, or bush; the white and glittering splendour
of winter, and its cosy life by hearth or stove; the drowsiness of
summer, its suddenly inspired wish for shade and dew and water, all this
left them stolid. To move them was required the feeling of spring, the
strongest, most complete and stirring impression which, in our temperate
climates, can be given by Nature. The whole pleasurableness of warm air,
clear moist sky, the surprise of the shimmer of pale green, of the
yellowing blossom on tree tops, the first flicker of faint shadow where
all has been uniform, colourless, shadeless; the replacing of the long
silence by the endless twitter and trill of birds, endless in its way as
is the sea, twitter and trill on every side, depths and depths of it, of
every degree of distance and faintness, a sea of bird song; and along
with this the sense of infinite renovation to all the earth and to man's
own heart. Of all Nature's effects this one alone goes sparkling to the
head; and it alone finds a response in mediaeval poetry. Spring, spring,
endless spring--for three long centuries throughout the world a dreary
green monotony of spring all over France, Provence, Italy, Spain,
Germany, England; spring, spring, nothing but spring even in the
mysterious countries governed by the Grail King, by the Fairy Morgana,
by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John; nay, in the new Jerusalem, in the
kingdom of Heaven itself, nothing but spring; till one longs for a bare
twig, for a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a draught of water
in the desert. The green fields and meadows enamelled with painted
flowers, how one detests them! how one would rejoice to see them well
sprinkled with frost or burnt up to brown in the dry days! the birds,
the birds which warble through every sonnet, canzone, sirventes, glosa,
dance lay, roundelay, virelay, rondel, ballade, and whatsoever else it
may be called,--how one wishes them silent for ever, or their twitter,
the tarantarantandei of the eternal German nightingale especially,
drowned by a good howling wind J After any persistent study of mediaeval
poetry, one's feeling towards spring is just similar to that of the
morbid creature in Schubert's "Muellerin," who would not stir from home
for the dreadful, dreadful greenness, which he would fain bleach with
tears, all around:
Ich moechte ziehn in die Welt hinaus, hinaus in die weite
Welt,
Wenn's nur so gruen, so gruen nicht war da draussen in
Wald und Feld.
Moreover this mediaeval spring is the spring neither of the shepherd, nor
of the farmer, nor of any man to whom spring brings work and anxiety and
hope of gain; it is a mere vague spring of gentle-folk, or at all events
of well-to-do burgesses, taking their pleasure on the lawns of castle
parks, or the green holiday places close to the city, much as we see
them in the first part of "Faust;" a sweet but monotonous charm of
grass, beneath green lime tree, or in the South the elm or plane; under
which are seated the poet and the fiddler, playing and singing for the
young women, their hair woven with chaplets of fresh flowers, dancing
upon the sward. And poet after poet, Provencal, Italian, and German,
Nithart and Ulrich, and even the austere singer of the Holy Grail,
Wolfram, pouring out verse after verse of the songs in praise of spring,
which they make even as girls wind their garlands: songs of quaint and
graceful ever-changing rythm, now slowly circling, now bounding along,
now stamping out the measure like the feet of the dancers, now winding
and turning as wind and twine their arms in the long-linked mazes; while
the few and ever-repeated ideas, the old, stale platitudes of praise of
woman, love pains, joys of dancing, pleasure of spring (spring, always
spring, eternal, everlasting spring) seem languidly to follow the life
and movement of the mere metre. Poets, these German, Provencal, French,
and early Italian lyrists, essentially (if we venture to speak heresy)
not of ideas or emotions, but of metre, of rythm and rhyme; with just
the minimum of necessary thought, perpetually presented afresh just as
the words, often and often repeated and broken up and new combined, of a
piece of music--poetry which is in truth a sort of music, dance or dirge
or hymn music as the case may be, more than anything else.
As it is in mediaeval poetry with the seasons, so it is likewise with the
country and its occupations: as there is only spring, so there is only
the forest. Of the forest, mediaeval poetry has indeed much to say; more
perhaps, and more familiar with its pleasures, than Antiquity. There is
the memorable forest where the heroes of the Nibelungen go to hunt,
followed by their waggons of provisions and wine; where Siegfried
overpowers the bear, and returns to his laughing comrades with the huge
thing chained to his saddle; where, in that clear space which we see so
distinctly, a lawn on to which the blue black firs are encroaching,
Siegfried stoops to drink of the spring beneath the lime tree, and Hagen
drives his boarspear straight through the Nibelung's back. There is the
thick wood, all a golden haze through the young green, and with an
atmosphere of birds' song, where King Mark discovers Tristram and Iseult
in the cave, the deceitful sword between them, as Gottfried von
Strassburg relates with wonderful luscious charm. The forest, also, more
bleak and austere, where the four outlawed sons of Aymon live upon roots
and wild animals, where they build their castle by the Meuse. Further,
and most lovely of all, the forest in which Nicolette makes herself a
hut of branches, bracken, and flowers, through which the stars peep down
on her whiteness as she dreams of her Lord Aucassin. The forest where
Huon meets Oberon; and Guy de Lusignan, the good snake-lady; and
Parzival finds on the snow the feathers and the drops of blood which
throw him into his long day-dream; and Owen discovers the tomb of
Merlin; the forest, in short, which extends its interminable glades and
serried masses of trunks and arches of green from one end to the other
of mediaeval poetry. It is very beautiful, this forest of the Middle
Ages; but it is monotonous, melancholy; and has a terrible eeriness in
its endlessness. For there is nothing else. There are no meadows where
the cows lie lazily, no fields where the red and purple kerchiefs of the
reapers overtop the high corn; no orchards, no hayfields; nothing like
those hill slopes where the wild herbs encroach upon the vines, and the
goats of Corydon and Damoetas require to be kept from mischief; where, a
little lower down, the Athenian shopkeeper of Aristophanes goes daily to
look whether yesterday's hard figs may not have ripened, or the vine
wreaths pruned last week grown too lushly. Nor anything of the sort of
those Umbrian meadows, where Virgil himself will stop and watch the
white bullocks splashing slowly into the shallow, sedgy Clitumnus; still
less like those hamlets in the cornfields through which Propertius would
stroll, following the jolting osier waggon, or the procession with
garlands and lights to Pales or to the ochre-stained garden god. Nothing
of all this: there are no cultivated spots in mediaeval poetry; the city
only, and the castle, and the endless, all-encompassing forest.
And to this narrowness of mediaeval notions of outdoor life, inherited
together with mediaeval subjects by the poets even of the sixteenth
century, must be referred the curious difference existing between the
romance poets of antiquity, like Homer in the Odyssey, and the romance
poets--Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens--of modern times, in
the matter of--how shall I express it?--the ideal life, the fortunate
realms, the "Kennaqwhere." In Homer, in all the ancients, the ideal
country is merely a more delightful reality; and its inhabitants happier
everyday men and women; in the poetry sprung from the Middle Ages it is
always a fairy-land constructed by mechanicians and architects. For, as
we have seen, the Middle Ages could bequeath to the sixteenth century no
ideal of peaceful outdoor enjoyment. Hence, in the poetry of the
sixteenth century, still permeated by mediaeval traditions, an appalling
artificiality of delightfulness. Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all
imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid
god-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies
hidden in elaborate gardens, all bedizened with fashionable
architecture: regular palaces, pleasaunces, with uncomfortable edifices,
artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous plants, parrots,
apes, giraffes; childish splendours of gardening and engineering and
menageries, which we meet already in "Ogier the Dane" and "Huon of
Bordeaux," and which later poets epitomized out of the endless
descriptions of Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," the still more
frightful inventories of the Amadis romances. They are, each of them, a
kind of anticipated Marly, Versailles, Prince Elector's Friedrichsruhe
or Nymphenburg, with clipped cypresses and yews, doubtless, and (O Pales
and Pan!) flower-beds filled with coloured plaster and spas, and
cascades spirting out (thanks to fifty invisible pumps) under your feet
and over your head. All the vineyards and cornfields have been swept
away to make these solemn terraces and water-works; all the cottages
which, with their little wooden shrine, their humble enclosure of
sunflowers and rosemary and fruit trees, their buzzing hives and barking
dogs, were loved and sung even by town rakes like Catullus and smart
coffeehouse wits like Horace; all these have been swept away to be
replaced by the carefully constructed (? wire) bowers, the aviaries, the
porticoes, the frightful circular edifice (_tondo e il ricco edificio_),
a masterpiece of Palladian stucco work, in which Armida and Rinaldo,
Acrasia and her Knight, drearily disport themselves. What has become of
Calypso's island? of the orchards of Alcinous? What would the noble
knights and ladies of Ariosto and Spenser think of them? What would they
say, these romantic, dainty creatures, were they to meet Nausicaa with
the washed linen piled on her waggon? Alas! they would take her for a
laundress. For it is the terrible aristocratic idleness of the Middle
Ages, their dreary delicacy, which hampers Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso,
Spenser, even in the midst of their most unblushing plagiarisms from
Antiquity: their heroes and heroines have been brought up, surrounded by
equerries and duennas, elegant, useless things, or at best (the knights
at least) good only for aristocratic warfare. Plough or prune! defile
the knightly hands! wash or cook, ply the loom like Nausicaa, Calypso,
or Penelope! The mere thought sends them very nearly into a faint. No:
the ladies of mediaeval romance must sit quiet, idle; at most they may
sing to the lute; and if they work with their hands, it must be some
dreary, strictly useless, piece of fancy work; they are hot-house
plants, all these dainty folk.
Had they no eyes, then, these poets of the Middle Ages, that they could
see, among all the things of Nature, only those few which had been seen
by their predecessors? At first one feels tempted to think so, till the
recollection of many vivid touches in spring and forest descriptions
persuades one that, enormous as was the sway of tradition among these
men, they were not all of them, nor always, repeating mere conventional
platitudes. This singular limitation in the mediaeval perceptions of
Nature--a limitation so important as almost to make it appear as if the
Middle Ages had not perceived Nature at all--is most frequently
attributed to the prevalence of asceticism, which, according to some
critics, made all mediaeval men into so many repetitions of Bernard of
Clairvaux, of whom it is written that, being asked his opinion of Lake
Leman, he answered with surprise that, during his journey from Geneva to
the Rhone Valley, he had remarked no lake whatever, so absorbed had he
been in spiritual meditations. But the predominance of asceticism has
been grossly exaggerated. It was a state of moral tension which could
not exist uninterruptedly, and could exist only in the classes for whom
poetry was not written. The mischief done by asceticism was the warping
of the moral nature of men, not of their aesthetic feelings; it had no
influence upon the vast numbers, the men and women who relished the
profane and obscene fleshliness and buffoonery of stage plays and
fabliaux, and those who favoured the delicate and exquisite immoralities
of Courtly poetry. Indeed, the presence of whole classes of writings, of
which such things as Boccaccio's Tales, "The Wife of Bath," and Villon's
"Ballades," on the one hand, and the songs of the troubadours, the poem
of Gottfried, and the romance or rather novel of "Flamenca," are
respectively but the most conspicuous examples, ought to prove only too
clearly that the Middle Ages, for all their asceticism, were both as
gross and as aesthetic in sensualism as antiquity had been before them.
We must, therefore, seek elsewhere than in asceticism, necessarily
limited, and excluding the poetry-reading public, for an explanation of
this peculiarity of mediaeval poetry. And we shall find it, I think, in
that which during the Middle Ages could, because it was an
all-regulating social condition, really create universal habits of
thought and feeling, namely, feudalism. A moral condition like
asceticism must leave unbiassed all such minds as are incapable of
feeling it; but a social institution like feudalism walls in the life of
every individual, and forces his intellectual movements into given
paths; nor is there any escape, excepting in places where, as in Italy
and in the free towns of the North, the feudal conditions are wholly or
partially unknown. To feudalism, therefore, would I ascribe this, which
appears at first so purely aesthetic, as opposed to social, a
characteristic of the Middle Ages. Ever since Schiller, in his "Gods of
Greece," spoke for the first time of undivinized Nature (_die
entgoetterte Natur_), it has been the fashion among certain critics to
fall foul of Christianity for having robbed the fields and woods of
their gods, and reduced to mere manured clods the things which had been
held sacred by antiquity. Desecrated in those long mediaeval centuries
Nature may truly have been, but not by the holy water of Christian
priests. Desecrated because out of the fields and meadows was driven a
divinity greater than Pales or Vertumnus or mighty Pan, the divinity
called _Man_. For in the terrible times when civilization was at its
lowest, the things of the world had been newly allotted; and by this new
allotment, man--the man who thinks and loves and hopes and strives, man
who fights and sings--was shut out from the fields and meadows,
forbidden the labour, nay, almost the sight, of the earth; and to the
tending of kine, and sowing of crops, to all those occupations which
antiquity had associated with piety and righteousness, had deemed worthy
of the gods themselves, was assigned, or rather condemned, a creature
whom every advancing year untaught to think or love, or hope, or fight,
or strive; but taught most utterly to suffer and to despair. For a man
it is difficult to call him, this mediaeval serf, this lump of earth
detached from the field and wrought into a semblance of manhood, merely
that the soil of which it is part should be delved and sown, and then
manured with its carcass or its blood; nor as a man did the Middle Ages
conceive it. The serf was not even allowed human progenitors: his foul
breed had originated in an obscene miracle; his stupidity and ferocity
were as those of the beasts; his cunning was demoniac; he was born under
God's curse; no words could paint his wickedness, no persecutions could
exceed his deserts; the whole world turned pale at his crime, for he it
was, he and not any human creature, who had nailed Christ upon the
cross. Like the hunger and sores of a fox or a wolf, his hunger and his
sores are forgotten, never noticed. Were it not that legal and
ecclesiastical narratives of trials (not of feudal lords for crushing
and contaminating their peasants, but of peasants for spitting out and
trampling on the consecrated wafer) give us a large amount of
pedantically stated detail; tell us how misery begat vice, and filth and
starvation united families in complicated meshes of incest, taught them
depopulation as a virtue and a necessity; and how the despair of any joy
in nature, of any mercy from God, hounded men and women into the
unspeakable orgies, the obscene parodies, of devil worship; were it not
for these horrible shreds of judicial evidence (as of tatters of clothes
or blood-clotted hairs on the shoes of a murderer) we should know little
or nothing of the life of the men and women who, in mediaeval France and
Germany, did the work which had been taught by Hesiod and Virgil. About
all these tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to show us
town vice and town horror, dens of prostitution and creaking,
overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's poems, utters not a word. All that
we can hear is the many-throated yell of mediaeval poets, noble and
plebeian, French, Provencal, and German, against the brutishness, the
cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness, the heresy of the serf, whose
name becomes synonymous with every baseness; which, in mock grammatical
style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness; whose punishment is
prayed for from the God whom he outrages by his very existence; a
hideous clamour of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless
accusation, of every form of words which furious hatred can assume,
whose echoes reached even countries like Tuscany, where serfdom was well
nigh unknown, and have reached even to us in the scraps of epigram still
bandied about by the townsfolk against the peasants, nay, by the
peasants against themselves.[1] A monstrous rag doll, dressed up in
shreds of many-coloured villainy without a recognizable human feature,
dragged in mud, pilloried with unspeakable ordure, paraded in mock
triumph like a King of Fools, and burnt in the market-place like
Antichrist, such is the image which mediaeval poetry has left us of the
creature who was once the pious rustic, the innocent god-beloved
husbandman, on whose threshold justice stopped a while when she fled
from the towns of Antiquity.
[1] The reader may oppose to my views the existence of the--class of
poems, French, Latin, and German, of which the Provencal Pastourela is
the original type, and which represent the courting, by the poet, who
is, of course, a knight, of a beautiful country-girl, who is shown us as
feeding her sheep or spinning with her distaff. But these poems are, to
the best of my knowledge, all of a single pattern, and extremely
insincere and artificial in tone, that I feel inclined to class them
with the pastorals--Dresden china idylls by men who had never looked a
live peasant in the face--of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
--as distant descendants from the pastoral poetry of antiquity, of which
the chivalric poets may have got some indirect notions as they did of
the antique epics. It is moreover extremely the likely that these love
poems, in which, successfully or unsuccessfully, the poet usually offers
a bribe to the woman of low degree, conceal beneath the conventional
pastoral trappings the intrigues of minnesingers and troubadours with
women of the small artizan or village proprietor class. The real peasant
woman--the female of the villain--could scarcely have been above the
notice of the noblemen's servants; and, in countries where the
seigneurial rights were in vigour, would scarcely have been offered
presents and fine words. As regards the innumerable poems against the
peasantry, I may refer the reader to an extremely curious publication of
"Carmina Medii AEvi," recently made by Sig. Francesco Novati, and which
contains, besides a selection of specimens, a list of references on the
subject of poems "De Natura Rusticorum." One of the satirical
declensions runs as follows:
Singulariter. Pluraliter.
Nom. Hic villanus. Nom. Hi maledicti.
Gen. Huius rustici. Gen. Horum tristium.
Dat. Huic tferfero (_sic_). Dat. His mendacibus.
Acc. Hunc furem. Acc. Hos nequissimos.
Voc. O latro. Voc. O pessimi.
Abl. Ab hoc depredatore. Abl. Ab his infidelibus.
The accusation of heresy and of crucifying Christ is evidently
due to the devil-worship prevalent among the serfs, and is thus,
alluded to in a north Italian poem, probably borrowed from the
French:
Christo fo da villan crucifio,
E stagom sempre in pioza, in vento, e in neve,
Perche havom fato cosi gran pecca.
This feeling is exactly analogous to that existing nowadays in
semi-barbarous countries against the Jews. The idle hated the
industrious, and hated them all the more when their industry brought
them any profit.]
Yet not so; I can recall one, though only one, occasion in which
mediaeval literature shows us the serf. The place is surely the most
unexpected, the charming thirteenth century tale of "Aucassin et
Nicolette." In his beautiful essay upon that story, Mr. Pater has
deliberately omitted this episode, which is indeed like a spot of
blood-stained mud upon some perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver
ground. It is a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and
unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of almost childish
love, the love of the beautiful son of the lord of Beaucaire for a
beautiful Saracen slave girl. For, although Aucassin and Nicolette are
often separated, and always disconsolate--she in her wonderfully
frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison--there is always
surrounding them a sort of fairy land of trees and flowers, a constant
song of birds; although they wander through the woods and tear their
delicate skin, and catch their hair in brambles and briars, we have
always the sense of the daisies bending beneath their tread, of the
green leaves rustling aside from their heads covered with hair--"blond
et menu crespele." Their very hardships are lovely, like the hut of
flowering branches and grapes, which Nicolette builds for herself, and
through whose fissures the moonlight shines and the little stars
twinkle: so much so, that when they weep, these two beautiful and dainty
creatures, we listen as if to singing, and with no more sense of grief
than at some pathetic little snatch of melody. And in the midst of this
idyl of lovely things; in the midst of all these delicate patternings,
whose minuteness and faint tint merge into one vague pleasurable
impression; stands out, unintentionally placed there by the author,
little aware of its terrible tragic realism, the episode which I am
going to translate.
"Thus Aucassin wandered all day through the forest, without hearing
any news of his sweet love; and when he saw that dusk was
spreading, he began bitterly to weep. As he was riding along an old
road, where weeds and grass grew thick and high, he suddenly saw
before him, in the middle of this road, a man such as I am going to
describe to you. He was tall, ugly; nay, hideous quite
marvellously. His face was blacker than smoked meat, and so wide,
that there was a good palm's distance between his eyes; his cheeks
were huge, his nostrils also, with a very big flat nose; thick lips
as red as embers, and long teeth yellow and smoke colour. He wore
leathern shoes and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on
his back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning upon a stout
bludgeon. Aucassin was startled and fearful, and said:
"'Fair brother ("beau frere"--a greeting corresponding to the
modern "bon homme")! God be with thee!'
"'God bless you!' answered the man.
"'What dost thou here?' asked Aucassin.
"'What is that to you?' answered the man.
"'I ask thee from no evil motive.'
"'Then tell me why,' said the man, 'you yourself are weeping with
such grief? Truly, were I a rich man like you, nothing in the world
should make me weep.'
"'And how dost thou know me?'
"'I know you to be Aucassin, the son of the Count; and if you will
tell me why you weep, I will tell you why I am here.'
"'I will tell thee willingly,' answered Aucassin. 'This morning I
came to hunt in the forest; I had a white leveret, the fairest in
the world; I have lost him--that is why I am weeping.'
"'What!' cried the man;' it is for a stinking hound that you waste
the tears of your body? Woe to those who shall pity you; you, the
richest man of this country. If your father wanted fifteen or
twenty white leverets, he could get them. I am weeping and mourning
for more serious matters.'
"'And what are these?'
"'I will tell you. I was hired to a rich farmer to drive his
plough, dragged by four bullocks. Three days ago, I lost a red
bullock, the best of the four. I left the plough, and sought the
red bullock on all sides, but could not find him. For three days I
have neither eaten nor drunk, and have been wandering thus. I have
been afraid of going to the town, where they would put me in jail,
because I have not wherewith to pay for the bullock. All I possess
are the clothes on my back. I have a mother; and the poor woman had
nothing more valuable than me; since she had only an old smock
wherewith to cover her poor old limbs. They have torn the smock off
her back, and now she has to lie on the straw. It is about her that
I am afflicted more than about myself, because, as to me, I may get
some money some day or other, and as to the red bullock, he may be
paid for when he may. And I should never weep for such a trifle as
that. Ah! woe betide those who shall make sorrow with you!'"
Inserted merely to give occasion to show Aucassin's good heart in paying
the twenty _sols_ for the man's red bullock; perhaps for no reason at
all, but certainly with no idea of making the lover's misery seem by
comparison trifling--there are, nevertheless, few things in literature
more striking than the meeting in the wood of the daintily nurtured boy,
weeping over the girl whom he loves with almost childish love of the
fancy; and of that ragged, tattered, hideous serf, at whose very aspect
the Bel Aucassin stops in awe and terror. And the attitude is grand of
this unfortunate creature, who neither begs nor threatens, scarcely
complains, and not at all for himself; but merely tells his sordid
misfortune with calm resignation, as if used to such everyday miseries,
roused to indignation only at the sight of the tears which the fine-bred
youth is shedding. We feel the dreadful solemnity of the man's words; of
the reproach thus thrown by the long-suffering serf, accustomed to
misfortunes as the lean ox is to blows, to that delicate thing weeping
for his lady love, for the lady of his fancy. It is the one occasion
upon which that delicate and fantastic mediaeval love poetry, that
fanciful, wistful stripling King Love of the Middle Ages, in which he
keeps high court, and through which he rides in triumphal procession;
that King Love laughing and fainting by turns with all his dapper
artificiality of woes; is confronted with the sordid reality, the tragic
impersonation of all the dumb miseries, the lives and loves, crushed and
defiled unnoticed, of the peasantry of those days. Yes, while they
sing--Provencals, minnesingers, Sicilians, sing of their earthly lady
and of their paramour in heaven--the hideous peasant, whose naked granny
is starving on the straw, looks on with dull and tearless eyes; crying
out to posterity, as the serf cries to Aucassin: "Woe to those who shall
sorrow at the tears of such as these."