Part 10

Such is the moment when we first hear the almost universal song of mediæval love. This song comes from the triumphantly reorganized portion of society, not from the part which is slowly working its way to reorganization; not from the timidly encroaching burghers, but from the nobles. The reign of town poetry, of fabliaux and meistersang, comes later; the poets of the early Middle Ages, trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers are, with barely one or two exceptions, all knights. And their song comes from the castle. Now, in order to understand mediæval love, we must reflect for a moment upon this feudal castle, and upon the kind of life which the love poets of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century--whether lords like Bertram de Born, and Guillaume de Poitiers, among the troubadours; the Vidame de Chartres, Meurisses de Craon, and the Duke of Brabant among the trouvères of Northern France; like Ulrich von Liechtenstein among the minnesingers; or retainers and hangers-on like Bernard de Ventadour and Armand de Mareulh, like Chrestiens de Troyes, Gaisses Brulez, or Quienes de Béthune, like Walther, Wolfram, and Tannhäuser--great or small, good or bad, saw before them and mixed with in that castle. The castle of a great feudatory of the early Middle Ages, whether north or south of the Loire, in Austria or in Franconia, is like a miniature copy of some garrison town in barbarous countries: there is an enormous numerical preponderance of men over women; for only the chiefs in command, the overlord, and perhaps one or two of his principal kinsmen or adjutants, are permitted the luxury of a wife; the rest of the gentlemen are subalterns, younger sons without means, youths sent to learn their military duty and the ways of the world: a whole pack of men without wives, without homes, and usually without fortune. High above all this deferential male crowd, moves the lady of the castle: highborn, proud, having brought her husband a dower of fiefs often equal to his own, and of vassals devoted to her race. About her she has no equals; her daughters, scarcely out of the nurse's hands, are given away in marriage; and her companions, if companions they may be called, are the waiting ladies, poor gentlewomen situated between the maid of honour and the ladies' maid, like that Brangwaine whom Yseult sacrifices to her intrigue with Tristram, or those damsels whom Flamenca gives over to the squires of her lover Guillems; at best, the wife of one of her husband's subalterns, or some sister or aunt or widow kept by charity. Round this lady--the stately, proud lady perpetually described by mediæval poets--flutters the swarm of young men, all day long, in her path: serving her at meals, guarding her apartments, nay, as pages, admitted even into her most secret chamber; meeting her for ever in the narrowness of that castle life, where every unnecessary woman is a burden usurping the place of a soldier, and, if possible, replaced by a man. Servants, lacqueys, and enjoying the privileges of ubiquity of lacqueys, yet, at the same time, men of good birth and high breeding, good at the sword and at the lute; bound to amuse this highborn woman, fading away in the monotony of feudal life, with few books to read or unable to read them, and far above all the household concerns which devolve on the butler, the cellarer, the steward, the gentleman, honourably employed as a servant. To them, to these young men, with few or no young women of their own age to associate, and absolutely no unmarried girls who could be a desirable match, the lady of the castle speedily becomes a goddess, the impersonation at once of that feudal superiority before which they bow, of that social perfection which they are commanded to seek, and of that womankind of which the castle affords so few examples. To please her, this lazy, bored, highbred woman, with all the squeamishness and caprice of high birth and laziness about her, becomes their ideal; to be favourably noticed, their highest glory; to be loved, these wretched mortals, by this divinity--that thought must often pass through their brain and terrify them with its delicious audacity; oh no, such a thing is not possible. But it is. The lady at first, perhaps most often, singles out as a pastime some young knight, some squire, some page; and, in a half-queenly, half-motherly way, corrects, rebukes his deficiencies, undertakes to teach him his duty as a servant. The romance of the "Petit Jehan de Saintre," written in the fifteenth century, but telling, with a delicacy of cynicism worthy of Balzac, what must have been the old, old story of the whole feudal Middle Ages, shows the manner in which, while feeling that he is being trained to knightly courtesy and honour, the young man in the service of a great feudal lady is gradually taught dissimulation, lying, intrigue; is initiated by the woman who looms above him like a saint into all the foulness of adultery. Adultery; a very ugly word, which must strike almost like a handful of mud in the face whosoever has approached this subject of mediæval love in admiration of its strange delicacy and enthusiasm. Yet it is a word which must be spoken, for in it is the explanation of the whole origin and character of this passion which burst into song in the early Middle Ages. This almost religious love, this love which conceives no higher honour than the service of the beloved, no higher virtue than eternal fidelity--this love is the love for another man's wife. Between unmarried young men and young women, kept carefully apart by the system which gives away a girl without her consent and only to a rich suitor, there is no possibility of love in these early feudal courts; the amours, however licentious, between kings' daughters and brave knights, of the Carolingian tales, belong to a different rank of society, to the prose romances made up in the fourteenth century for the burgesses of cities; the intrigues, ending in marriage, of the princes and princesses of the cycle of Amadis, belong to a different period, to the fifteenth century, and to courts where feudal society scarcely exists; the squires, the young knights who hang about a great baronial establishment of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, have still to make their fortune, and do not dream of marriage. The husband, on the other hand, the great lord or successful knightly adventurer, married late in life, and married from the necessity, for ever pressing upon the feudal proprietor, of adding on new fiefs and new immunities, of increasing his importance and independence in proportion to the hourly increasing strength and claims of the overlord, the king, who casts covetous eyes upon him--the husband has not married for love; he has had his love affairs with the wives of other men in his day, or may still have them; this lady is a mere feudal necessity, she is required to give him a dower and give him an heir, that is all. If the husband does not love, how much less can the wife; married, as she is, scarce knowing what marriage is, to a man much older than herself, whom most probably she has never seen, to whom she is a mere investment. Nay, there is not even the after-marriage love of the ancients: this wife is not the housekeeper, the woman who works that the man's house may be rich and decorous; not even the nurse of his children, for the children are speedily given over to the squires and duennas; she is the woman of another family who has come into his, the stranger who must be respected (as that most typical mediæval wife, Eleanor of Guienne, was respected by her husbands) on account of her fiefs, her vassals, her kinsfolk; but who cannot be loved. Can there be love between man and wife? There cannot be love between man and wife. This is no answer of mine, fantastically deduced from mediæval poetry. It is the answer solemnly made to the solemnly asked question by the Court of Love held by the Countess of Champagne in 1174, and registered by Master Andrew the King of France's chaplain: "Dicimus enim et stabilito tenore firmamus amorem non posse inter duos jugales suas extendere vires." And the reason alleged for this judgment brings us back to the whole conception of mediæval love as a respectful service humbly waiting for a reward: "For," pursues the decision published by André le Chapelain, "whereas lovers grant to each other favours freely and from no legal necessity, married people have the duty of obeying each other's wishes and of refusing nothing to one another." "No love is possible between man and wife," repeat the Courts of Love which, consisting of all the highborn ladies of the province and presided by some mighty queen or princess, represent the social opinions of the day. "But this lady," says a knight (Miles) before the love tribunal of Queen Eleanor, "promised to me that if ever she should lose the love of her lover, she would take me in his place. She has wedded the man who was her lover, and I have come to claim fulfilment of her promise." The court discusses for awhile. "We cannot," answers Queen Eleanor, "go against the Countess of Champagne's decision that love cannot exist between man and wife. We therefore desire this lady to fulfil her promise and give you her love." Again, there come to the Court of Love of the Viscountess of Narbonne a knight and a lady, who desire to know whether, having been once married, but since divorced, a love engagement between them would be honourable. The viscountess decides that "Love between those who have been married together, but who have since been divorced from one another, is not to be deemed reprehensible; nay, that it is to be considered as honourable." And these Courts of Love, be it remarked, were frequently held on occasion of the marriage of great personages; as, for instance, of that between Louis VII. and Eleanor of Poitiers in 1137. The poetry of the early Middle Ages follows implicitly the decisions of these tribunals, which reveal a state of society to which the nearest modern approach is that of Italy in the eighteenth century, when, as Goldoni and Parini show us, as Stendhal (whose "De l'Amour" may be taken as the modern "Breviari d'Amor") expounds, there was no impropriety possible as long as a lady was beloved by any one except her own husband. No love, therefore, between unmarried people (the cyclical romances, as before stated, and the Amadises, belong to another time of social condition, and the only real exception to my rule of which I can think is the lovely French tale of "Aucassin et Nicolette"); and no love between man and wife. But love there must be; and love there consequently is; love for the married woman from the man who is not her husband. The feudal lady, married without being consulted and without having had a chance of knowing what love is, yet lives to know love; lives to be taught it by one of these many bachelors bound to flutter about her in military service or social duty; lives to teach it herself. And she is too powerful in her fiefs and kinsmen, too powerful in the public opinion which approves and supports her, to be hampered by her husband. The husband, indeed, has grown up in the same habits, has known, before marrying, the customs sanctioned by the Courts of Love; he has been the knight of some other man's wife in his day, what right has he to object? As in the days of Italian _cecisbei_, the early mediæval lover might say with Goldoni's Don Alfonso or Don Roberto, "I _serve_ your wife--such or such another serves mine, what harm can there be in it?" ("Io servo vostra moglie, Don Eugenio favorisce la mia; che male c' e?" I am quoting from memory.) And as a fact, we hear little of jealousy; the amusement of En Barral when Peire Vidal came in and kissed his sleeping wife; and the indignation of all Provence for the murder of Guillems de Cabestanh (buried in the same tomb with the lady who had been made to eat of his heart)--showing from opposite sides how the society accustomed to Courts of Love looked upon the duties of husbands.

Such was the social life in those feudal courts whence first arises the song of mediæval love, and that this is the case is proved by the whole huge body of early mediæval poetry. We must not judge, as I have said, either by poems of much earlier date, like the Nibelungen and the Carolingian _chansons de geste_, which merely received a new form in the early Middle Ages; still less from the prose romances of Mélusine, Milles et Amys, Palemon and Arcite, and a host of others which were elaborated only later and under the influence of the quite unfeudal habits of the great cities; and least of all from that strange late southern cycle of the Amadises, from which, odd as it seems, many of our notions of chivalric love have, through our ancestors, through the satirists or burlesque poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, been inherited. We must look at the tales which, as we are constantly being told by trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers, were the fashionable reading of the feudal classes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the tales best known to us in the colourless respectability of the collection made in the reign of Edward IV. by Sir Thomas Malory, and called by him the "Morte d'Arthur"--of the ladies and knights of Arthur's court; of the quest of the Grail by spotless knights who were bastards and fathers of bastards; of the intrigues of Tristram of Lyoness and Queen Yseult; of Launcelot and Guenevere; the tales which Francesca and Paolo read together. We must look, above all, at the lyric poetry of France, Provence, Germany, and Sicily in the early Middle Ages.

Vos qui très bien ameis i petit mentendeis Por l'amor de Ihesu les pucelles ameis. Nos trouvons en escris de sainte auctoriteis Ke pucelle est la fleur de loyaulment ameir.

This strange entreaty to love the maidens for the sake of Christ's love, this protest of a nameless northern French poet (Wackernagel, Altfranzösische Lieder and Leiche IX.) against the adulterous passion of his contemporaries, comes to us, pathetically enough, solitary, faint, unnoticed in the vast chorus, boundless like the spring song of birds or the sound of the waves, of poets singing the love of other men's wives. But, it may be objected--how can we tell that these love songs, so carefully avoiding all mention of names, are not addressed to the desired bride, to the legitimate wife of the poet? For several reasons; and mainly, for the crushing evidence of an undefinable something which tells us that they are not. The other reasons are easily stated. We know that feudal habits would never have allowed to unmarried women (and women were married when scarcely out of their childhood) the opportunities for the relations which obviously exist between the poet and his lady; and that, if by some accident a young knight might fall in love with a girl, he would address not her but her parents, since the Middle Ages, who were indifferent to adultery, were, like the southern nations among whom the married woman is not expected to be virtuous, extreme sticklers for the purity of their unmarried womankind. Further, we have no instance of an unmarried woman being ever addressed during the early Middle Ages, in those terms of social respect--_madame, domna, frowe, madonna_--which essentially belong to the mistress of a household; nor do these stately names fit in with any theory which would make us believe that the lady addressed by the poet is the jealously guarded daughter of the house with whom he is plotting a secret marriage, or an elopement to end off in marriage. This is not the way that Romeo speaks to Juliet, nor even that the princesses in the cyclical romances and in the Amadises are wooed by their bridegrooms. This is not the language of a lover who is broaching his love, and who hopes, however timidly, to consummate it before all the world by marriage. It is obviously the language of a man either towards a woman who is taking a pleasure in keeping him dangling without favours which she has implicitly or explicitly promised; or towards a woman who is momentarily withholding favours which her lover has habitually enjoyed. And in a large proportion of cases the poems of trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers are the expression of fortunate love, the fond recollection or eager expectation of meetings with the beloved. All this can evidently not be connected with the wooing, however stealthy, however Romeo-and-Juliet-like of a bride; still less can it be explained in reference to love within wedlock. A man does not, however loving, worship his wife as his social superior; he does not address her in titles of stiff respect; he does not sigh and weep and supplicate for love which is his due, and remind his wife that she owes it him in return for loyal, humble, discreet service. Above all, a man (except in some absurd comedy perhaps, where the husband, in an age of _cicisbeos_, is in love with his own wife and dares not admit it before the society which holds "that there can be no love between married folk ")--a husband, I repeat, does not beg for, arrange, look forward to, and recall with triumph or sadness, secret meetings with his own wife. Now the secret meeting is, in nearly every aristocratic poet of the early poetry, the inevitable result of the humble praises and humble requests for kindness; it is, most obviously, _the_ reward for which the poet is always importuning. Mediæval love poetry, compared with the love poetry of Antiquity and the love poetry of the revival of letters, is, in its lyric form, decidedly chaste; but it is perfectly explicit; and, for all its metaphysical tendencies and its absence of clearly painted pictures, the furthest possible removed from being Platonic. One of the most important, characteristic, and artistically charming categories of mediæval love lyrics is that comprising the Provençal _serena_ and _alba,_ with their counterparts in the _langue d'oil_, and the so-called _Wachtlieder_ of the minnesingers; and this category of love poetry may be defined as the drama, in four acts, of illicit love. The faithful lover has received from his lady an answer to his love, the place and hour are appointed; all the day of which the evening is to bring him this honour, he goes heavy hearted and sighing: "Day, much do you grow for my grief, and the evening, the evening and the long hope kills me." Thus far the _serena_, the evening song, of Guiraut Riquier. A lovely anonymous _alba,_ whose refrain, "Oi deus, oi deus; de l' alba, tan tost ve!" is familiar to every smatterer of Provençal, shows us the lady and her knight in an orchard beneath the hawthorn, giving and taking the last kisses while the birds sing and the sky whitens with dawn. "The lady is gracious and pleasant, and many look upon her for her beauty, and her heart Is all in loving loyally; alas, alas, the dawn! how soon it: comes!--" "Oi deus, oi deus; de l'alba, tan tost ve!" The real _alba_ is the same as the German _Wachtlieder,_ the song of the squire or friend posted at the garden gate or outside the castle wall, warning the lovers to separate. "Fair comrade (Bel Companho), I call to you singing. 'Sleep no more, for I hear the birds announcing the day in the trees, and I fear that the jealous one may find you;' and in a moment it will be day, 'Bel Companho, come to the window and look at the signs in the sky! you will know me a faithful messenger; if you do it not, it will be to your harm" and in a moment it will be dawn (et ades sera l' alba)... Bel Companho, since I left you I have not slept nor raised myself from my knees; for I have prayed to God the Son of Saint Mary, that he should send me: back my faithful comrade, and in a moment it will be dawn In this _alba_ of Guiraut de Borneulh, the lover comes at last to the window, and cries to his watching comrade that he is too happy to care either for the dawn or for the jealous one. The German _Wachtlieder_ are even more explicit. "He must away at once and without delay," sings the watchman in a poem of Wolfram, the austere singer of Parzifal and the Grail Quest; "let him go, sweet lady; let him away from thy love so that he keep his honour and life. He trusted himself to me that I should bring him safely hence; it is day ..." "Sing what thou wilt, watchman," answers the lady, "but leave him here." In a far superior, but also far less chaste poem of Heinrich von Morungen, the lady, alone and melancholy, wakes up remembering the sad white light of morning, the sad cry of the watchman, which separated her from her knight. Still more frankly, and in a poem which is one of the few real masterpieces of Minnesang, the lady in Walther von der Vogelweide's "Under der linden an der Heide" narrates a meeting in the wood. "What passed between us shall never be known by any! never by any, save him and me--yes, and by the little nightingale that sang _Tandaradei_! The little bird will surely be discreet."

The songs of light love for another's wife of troubadour, trouvère, and minnesinger, seem to have been squeezed together, so that all their sweet and acrid perfume is, so to speak, sublimated, in the recently discovered early Provençal narrative poem called "Flamenca." Like the "Tristram" of Gottfried von Strassburg, like all these light mediæval love _lyrics,_ of which I have been speaking, the rhymed story of "Flamenca," a pale and simple, but perfect petalled daisy, has come up in a sort of moral and intellectual dell in the winter of the Middle Ages--a dell such as you meet in hollows of even the most wind-swept southern hills, where, while all round the earth is frozen and the short grass nibbled away by the frost, may be found even at Christmas a bright sheen of budding wheat beneath the olives on the slope, a yellow haze of sun upon the grass in which the little aromatic shoots of fennel and mint and marigold pattern with greenness the sere brown, the frost-burnt; where the very leafless fruit trees have a spring-like rosy tinge against the blue sky, and the tufted little osiers flame a joyous orange against the greenness of the hill.