though they are mainly based on well-known themes, Roswitha shows much
originality in description. Whilst they need not detain us, passing
reference may be made to two of them--the Passion of St. Pelagius of
Cordova, and the Fall and Conversion of Theophilus--since their
subject matter is of value to us to-day. The one interests us because,
in relating that the story was told her by an eye-witness of the
martyrdom in A.D. 925 (_Acta SS._ Jun. V.), she shows that
communication existed between that great intellectual centre, Cordova,
and Germany, a fact that must have had considerable influence on art
and literature; the other as being the story out of which the Faust
legend was developed.
After these legends, we turn to her panegyric on the Emperor Otho.
This she opens by acknowledging her debt to the Abbess Gerberg, niece
of Otho the Great, for aiding her in her literary work with her
superior knowledge, and for giving her the necessary information
concerning the royal doings. Then by humbly likening her mental
perplexity and fear on entering upon so vast a subject to the feelings
of one who has to cross a forest in winter when snow has obliterated
the track, she in a few words pictures for us the natural wooded
surroundings of the convent. Her poem--for such it really is--then
sets forth the personal history of this monarch and his predecessors,
rather than public events, and is thus of value more on account of its
poetical than its historical quality. But one episode, picturesque in
its quaint setting, and interesting historically because its stirring
details are not to be found elsewhere, is worthy of record. It
centres round Adelheid, the young and beautiful widow of Lothair, a
Lombard king. Taken prisoner by his successor, the tyrant Berengarius,
she is immured in a castle on the Lago di Garda, and threatened with a
forced marriage with the son of her oppressor. This threat seems to
endow her with superhuman power. Bidding defiance to all difficulty
and danger, she contrives gradually to dig a secret way through the
soft earth, and suddenly finds herself free. Dawn is just breaking.
But how can she make use of her freedom before her guards awake and
discover her escape? Quickly is her mind made up. But let Roswitha
herself tell the story:--
As soon as black night yielded to the twilight, and the
heavens began to pale before the rays of the sun, warily
hiding herself in secluded caves, now she wanders in the
woods, now lurks in the furrows amongst the ripe ears of
Ceres, until returning night, clothed in its wonted gloom,
again veils the earth in darkness. Then once more is she
diligent to pursue her way begun. And her guards, not
finding her, all-trembling make it known to the officer
charged with the safe keeping of the lady. And he, struck to
the heart with the terror of grievous fear, set forth with
much company to make diligent search for her, and when he
failed, and moreover could not discover whither the most
illustrious queen had turned her steps, fearful, he made
report of the matter to King Berengarius. And he, at once
filled with exceeding wrath, forthwith sent his dependants
everywhere around, commanding them not to overlook any small
place, but cautiously to examine every hiding-place, lest
perchance the queen might be lying hid in any one. And he
himself followed with a band of stout-hearted troops as if
to overcome some fierce enemy in battle. And rapidly did he
pass on his way through the self-same corn-field in the
which the lady whom he sought was lurking in the bent-back
furrows, hidden beneath the wings of Ceres. Hither and
thither forsooth he traversed the very spot where she lay,
burdened with no little fear, and although, with great
effort, he essayed with outstretched spear to part the corn
around, yet he discovered not her whom by the grace of
Christ it concealed.
From the sheltering corn Adelheid effects her escape, and after weary
wandering, reaches the Castle of Canossa, the stronghold of the Counts
of Tuscany. Any one who has visited this now ruined castle, some
twenty miles from Parma, will remember the threadlike way between
rocks covered with brambles, by which its eyrie height is approached.
Up this steep track the queen, fearful of any pause, hastens, and
finds a welcome and ready help. The Count becomes her champion, and
appeals on her behalf to the Emperor Otho. The latter, glad of an
excuse to further his cause in Italy, descends with his troops into
the Lombard plain, weds the beautiful Adelheid, and receives the
formal cession of the so-called kingdom of Italy from Berengarius and
his son, whose power had ebbed away in their futile attempts to
control their feudatories.
Roswitha's thrilling narrative is amplified by the graphic account
recorded by St. Odilo, Abbot of Cluny, Queen Adelheid's friend and
one-time confessor. In this he tells us that during Adelheid's
imprisonment in a castle on the Lago di Garda, her chaplain Martin
succeeds in making a hole in the wall, through which the queen and her
maidservant, disguised as men, creep. He does not recount the episode
of the hiding in the corn, but relates another equally stirring
adventure. He tells us that, in fleeing from their persecutor to the
safety of Canossa, the fugitives become involved in a swamp. After two
days, they are rescued from their perilous position by a fisherman
who, passing near by, and hearing sounds of distress, goes to their
aid. Their deliverer, finding them faint with hunger and cold, lights
a fire with the flint he carries in his wallet, and cooks some small
fish, the only food he has to offer them. Once more they start on
their way, and eventually reach Canossa. But hardly do they gain
admittance, ere the castle is surrounded by the soldiery of the
outwitted and wrathful Berengarius. A knight, carrying a message from
the Emperor Otho of promised deliverance, essays to enter the castle,
but finding this impossible owing to the hostile troops encamped
around, he fastens the letter to an arrow, and shoots it over the
wall. A strong force sent by Otho is near at hand, and speedily puts
the enemy to flight. Adelheid is rescued, and is brought with
rejoicing to Pavia, her dower city, which had already opened its gates
to the Emperor, and she and the Emperor enter the city together in
triumph. Much has been written of the illustrious Adelheid, but
perhaps she would best like to be remembered by the eulogy of her
confessor--the saintly Odilo--that she never forgot a kindness, or
remembered an injury.
It is in a spirit far different from that of her panegyric on the
emperor Otho that Roswitha writes her dramas. Fear and mental
perplexity no longer possess her. Though humbly begging the reader not
to "despise these strains drawn from a fragile reed," she has no
misgiving, for she feels that herein lies her mission. She explains
her reason for using the dramatic form, and for taking Terence as her
model. There are many, she says,--and she does not entirely exonerate
herself,--who, beguiled by the elegant diction of the Classics, prefer
them to religious writings, whilst there are others who, though
generally condemning heathen works, eagerly peruse the poetic
creations of Terence because of the special beauty of his language.
She further expresses the hope that by trying to imitate his manner,
and by at the same time dramatising legends calculated to edify, she
may induce readers to turn from the "godless contents of his works" to
the contemplation of virtuous living. Emboldened by this pious hope,
Roswitha shrinks from no difficulties or details, details which might
well have made her hesitate, and which, betraying a knowledge of the
world, have raised the question as to whether she made her profession
as early as was customary. This solicitude of Roswitha for the welfare
of frail and all too human mankind recalls St. Bernard's condemnation,
some hundred and fifty years later, of all carving in church or
cloister, when he says, "one reads with more pleasure what is carven
in stones than what is written in books, and would rather gaze all day
upon these singular creations than meditate upon the Divine Word."
It has been maintained that the classic theatre decayed and
disappeared as Christianity became all-powerful in Europe, and that
the modern theatre seemingly arose in the twelfth century out of the
services of the Church, and owed no debt to the past. But neither
Nature nor Art works in this way except to our own unperceiving minds.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, and the consequent disruption of
society, classic civilisation gradually withdrew into the security of
the religious communities, seeking, like distraught humanity, shelter
and protection. It was in such tranquil atmosphere as this that Latin
drama, though condemned in substance, was fostered and favoured as an
education in style. Roswitha's plays may, as has been said, have been
the last ray of classical antiquity, but if so, it was a ray, like the
pillar of fire, bright enough to guide through the dark night of
feudalism to the coming day.
Whether her dramatic efforts were an isolated phenomenon or not, must
remain undecided, but it is reasonable to assume that any work
surviving to the present day is but a sample of much else of the same
sort that has disappeared in the course of time. Still all we would
claim for them, apart from their intrinsic value and interest, is that
they helped to keep up continuity in the tradition of drama. The
gradual movement in the Church towards elaboration in its services
which began in the ninth century,--a movement which led to the
dramatising of the Mass, out of which the liturgical drama, and
eventually the miracle-play, were evolved,--was a popular movement. To
a people ignorant of Latin, yet fond of shows, it provided instruction
and diversion alike. Roswitha, on the other hand, avowedly wrote for
the literary world, and with a special end in view as regards that
world. To attain this end, she set before her, as her master in style,
Terence, who himself had aimed at a high ideal of artistic perfection,
and of whom it has been said that he perpetuated the art and genius of
Menander just as a master engraver perpetuates the designs of a great
painter whose works have since perished. Still, in spite of the
glamour of the style to which she aspires, and poetess though she is
by nature, her plays reflect the handiwork of the moralist rather than
that of the artist, for though beauty charms her by the way, her goal
is moral truth, and to this all else must yield. If we would see the
beauty of holiness as she saw it, we must enter in spirit within the
shrine of her thought and feeling, just as the traveller, standing
without the simple brick exterior of the tomb of Galla Placidia, at
Ravenna, must penetrate within if he would know of the beauty there
enshrined. "Il faut être saint, pour comprendre la sainteté."
The subject which dominates her horizon is that of Chastity. Treated
by her with didactic intent, this really resolves itself into a
conflict between Christianity and Paganism,--in other words, between
Chastity and Passion,--in which Christianity triumphs through the
virtue of Woman. But at the same time Roswitha neither contemns
marriage nor generally advocates celibacy. She merely counsels, as the
more blessed, the unmarried state. Yet even so, we feel that beneath
her nun's garb there beats the heart of a sympathetic woman, whose
emotional self-expression is but tempered by the ideals of her time
and her surroundings.
Another important element to be taken into account in her plays is the
part she assigns to the supernatural. It is impossible to develop
character with any continuity when the supernatural, like some sword
of Damocles, hovers continually overhead, ready to descend at any
moment and sever cause from effect. Such a sword was the Divine
Presence to Roswitha. When her plot requires it, she introduces a
miracle, converting a character, at a moment's notice, and in a way
that no evolution could possibly effect, into one of a totally
different kind. Still to her audience such a _dénouement_ would be
quite satisfactory. With her, sudden changes and conversions but
reflect the ideas which possessed the minds of her contemporaries, who
realised God more in deviations from, than in manifestations of, law
and order.
Were her plays ever performed? To this question no certain answer can
be given, since no record has yet been found of their performance, and
the best critics are at variance on the subject. But judging from
analogy, there seems to be no reason why they should not have been. We
know that as early as the fifth and sixth centuries the monks played
Terence, probably on some fête-day, or before their scholars as a
means of instruction, and doubtless Roswitha's plays were also acted
on special occasions, such as when the Emperor sojourned at
Gandersheim, or the Bishop made a visitation. As they were written in
Latin, the literary language of the time, this in itself, even if
their themes had appealed to the people, would have prevented them
from being performed save before the educated few. So if we would
picture to ourselves a performance of one of them by her companion
nuns in the Chapter House, or it may be in the refectory, it must be
before the Bishop and his clergy, and perhaps also some members of the
Imperial family, and lords and ladies of the Court. How refreshing
must such an entertainment have been to this distinguished company as
it found itself carried away into an atmosphere of poetry and passion,
of movement and colour, in place of the sobriety induced by the stiff
liturgical dramas that probably formed the usual diversion! Such a
drama was that of _The Wise and Foolish Virgins_, a specially
favourite old-world dramatic exercise, dispensed as a sort of
religious tonic to womankind, calculated to arouse slumbering souls,
or to quicken to still further effort those that did not slumber. For
us, its chief interest lies in the antiphonic arrangement of the
dialogue, in which we may trace the first germs of characterisation,
and in the music, the refrains of which contain the first suggestions,
as far as we know, of the principle of the leitmotiv, a principle
carried to its most complete development by Wagner. Although the
earliest known MS. of it is of the eleventh century, so finished, yet
so simple, are its dialogues and refrains, that it seems not
unreasonable to infer that the form of the play was well known, either
through some earlier MS. or through oral tradition. It is only a
slight development of the elegy in dialogue which was performed in
A.D. 874, at the funeral of Hathumoda, the first abbess of
Gandersheim. This dialogue takes place between the sorrow-stricken
nuns, who speak in chorus of their loss, and the monk Wichbert, who
acts as consoler. Although its form is liturgical, its subject
entitles it to be considered the earliest known mediæval dramatic work
extant.
Of Roswitha's dramas, three seem to stand out as of special
interest--_Abraham_, _Callimachus_, and _Paphnutius_. All of these are
more or less patchwork adaptations from the legendary débris of
antiquity. The first appears to have been taken by Roswitha from a
Latin translation of a fourth-century Greek legend.[10] Whilst she
does not display any originality in elaborating the story, but keeps
carefully to the text--so much so that at times she merely
transcribes--she reveals her artistic as well as her psychological
instinct by concentrating the essentials, thereby transforming a
rather discursive composition into a poignant picture. The subtle
touches, the sentiment, and the dialogue so pathetic and so true to
nature, make this drama verily her masterpiece, and one worthy of a
place beside the delicate and dramatic miniatures of the time. In a
few words, here is the story. A holy man, by name Abraham, has
abandoned a life of solitude in order to take care of his young
orphaned niece. After a few years, she is tempted to a house of ill
fame. Some two years later, her uncle, having discovered her
whereabouts, determines to exchange his hermit garb for that of a man
of the world, and go to the house in the guise of a lover, so as to
get an opportunity of speaking with his niece alone. Of course she
does not recognise him in his change of costume, and when he asks for
a kiss, she puts her arms round his neck, and suddenly detects a
strange perfume. Instantly a change comes over her. The scent recalls
to her her former unsullied life, and tears fill her eyes. At the
fitting moment the uncle makes himself known, and showing her with
sweet words of sympathy and encouragement that sin is natural to
humanity, and that what is evil is to continue in it, takes her back
with him to begin afresh the simple good life.
[10] Migne, _Patrol. Lat._ lxxiii.
The second play recounts an incident taken from the apocryphal Acts of
the Apostles, supposed to take place in the first century. A young
heathen, Callimachus, falls in love with a young married woman, a
Christian. She dies, and is buried the same day. That night
Callimachus goes to the grave, and with the help of a slave disinters
the body. Holding it in his arms, and triumphing in the embrace denied
to him in life, he suddenly falls dead. In the morning the husband and
St. John, coming to the cemetery to pray for her soul, see the rifled
grave and the two dead bodies. St. John, at the command of Christ, who
appears for but a moment, restores them both to life, and brings to
repentance the young man, who, in further amendment of his ways,
becomes a Christian. This mere outline of the play is given to suggest
points of resemblance between it--the first sketch of this kind of
drama of passion, the frenzy of the soul and senses--and the
masterpiece of this type, _Romeo and Juliet_.
Many passages in the plays of Roswitha remind us of Shakespeare, but
it is not possible to deal adequately with them here, nor does it seem
material to do so. There is no reason why Shakespeare should not have
seen a printed collection of her dramas. He, like Dante, seems to have
had the power of attracting material from every possible source, and
it should not be forgotten what a sensation was caused by Celtes
printing in 1501 Roswitha's MS. But, on the other hand, the
similarities we notice may be a mere coincidence, or, as is much more
likely, the details in each case may have been common property handed
down from one generation to another.
In her play of _Paphnutius_, Roswitha made use of a story taken from
the _Historia Monachorum_ of Rufinus, a contemporary of St. Jerome,
who had journeyed through Palestine and Egypt to visit the Hermits of
the Desert. The mention, too, at the beginning of Rufinus's account,
of a musician who tells of his retirement to a hermitage in order to
change the harmony of music into that of the spirit, evidently
suggested to her a discussion on music and harmony, probably adapted
from Boëthius's _De Musica_. In this discussion lies the chief
interest of the play as giving us some idea of the sort of
intellectual exercises probably practised by women in convents in the
tenth century. The play opens with a truly mediæval scene,--a
disputation between a hermit and his disciples on the question of
harmony between soul and body, suggested by the want of it in the life
of the courtesan Thais. Such harmony _should_ exist, says the holy
man, for though the soul is not mortal like the body, nor the body
spiritual like the soul, we shall, if we follow the method of the
dialecticians, find that such differences do not necessarily render
the two inharmonious. Harmony cannot be produced from like elements or
like sounds, but only by the right adjustment of those which are
dissimilar. This discussion on harmony naturally leads to one on
music, which is divided, according to the then received writers on the
subject, into three kinds--celestial, human, and instrumental. Music,
in the Middle Ages, was, for dialectical purposes, treated in
accordance with the Pythagorean theory as interpreted by Cicero in his
_Somnium Scipionis_, who represented the eight revolving spheres of
heaven--the Earth being fixed--as forming a complete musical octave.
Such celestial music forms the subject of the argument in Roswitha's
play, the music of Earth being merely touched upon. Why, it is asked,
do we not hear this music of the spheres if it exists? To this comes
the answer that some think it is because of its continuity, others
because of the density of the atmosphere, and others again because the
volume of sound cannot penetrate the narrow passage of the human ear.
And so with subtle argument, the music of Heaven was often drowned in
the din of Earth. Dante, in the _Paradiso_, lifted the idea once more
from Earth to Heaven, and clothed it in a wealth of gorgeous imagery.
But it is Shakespeare who, with the magic of a few words, has given
the thought immortality.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
* * * * *
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.
In judging of Roswitha's dramatic work it must be remembered that, in
true mediæval spirit fearing to profane what she venerates, she allows
herself but little licence with the legends she dramatises.
Nevertheless, as has been said, she from time to time shows, in
psychological touches, a capacity for originality quite phenomenal for
her time and for the literature of the cloister. Still her plays
express but a very small part of the whole gamut of human emotions and
experiences, just as her life was lived in an intellectual world
narrow from the point of view of to-day or of the great intellectual
age of antiquity. Many causes contributed to this. Intellectually, the
Christian world shrank as Paganism was superseded by Christianity, a
supersession by no means complete in Roswitha's day. Of course this
nascent Christianity was inconsistent with much of the intellectual
life of the ancient world, which was either inextricably interwoven
with Paganism, or essentially anti-religious. With its task of laying
afresh the foundations of education, politics, and morality, it had to
take root and become established in a relatively narrow intellectual
field, the boundaries of which had gradually to be broken down,
sometimes with violence.
Time, like some lens which clears our vision, makes it an easy task to
criticise and condemn a phase of religious life which, having essayed
to tranquillise and sweeten existence, was, under altered conditions
of civilisation, bound to pass away. We of to-day pride ourselves on
a wider view of life, on a higher conception of duty, expressed in
lives dedicated to public work as a necessary complement to private
virtue. Still, if we would judge fairly this age of contemplation and
faith within the convent walls, and all that, even if done mistakenly
and imperfectly, it aspired to do, we must realise, as best we can,
the world without those walls. One of our poets has vividly reflected
it for us when he speaks of man's life as made up of "whole centuries
of folly, noise, and sin." So bitter was life then and even later,
that by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when mysticism had
claimed many votaries, eternal rest, even at the cost of personal
annihilation, was the whispered desire of many devout souls.
"A Simple Stillness." "An Eternal Silence." These are the words that
float across the centuries to us, like echoes from troubled, longing
hearts. These are the words that give us the key to the understanding
of the choice of vocation of the mediæval woman. The spiritual need
for harmony and peace may have been great; the practical need was
perhaps even greater; for in its accomplishment the spiritual found
its consummation.
A TWELFTH-CENTURY ROMANCE-WRITER, MARIE DE FRANCE
"Marie ai nom, si sui de France." Thus, more than seven centuries ago,
wrote Marie de France. What an unpretentious autobiography! Yet these
few simple words, which seem to tell so little, but in reality suggest
so much, are the counterpart of her work, and form its fitting crown.