Part 10

The story works to its conclusion in a temper better fitted to the thirteenth century than to ours. The poet feels no complaisance for an obstinate wrong-doer. He says: "God is a worker of wonders, and this is the proper lot of a youth who called his father an old peasant and his mother a worthless woman." Nor does he stop with his own exclamation; he tells in detail how the blind and maimed fellow is brought by a boy to the farm, only to receive his father's taunts and mocking. Brutal and distressing as the passage seems, it is true to the age and to the character of the sturdy old farmer. While there was hope he had borne every insult; he had pleaded persistently, tenderly, and to every limit of generosity and devotion. But when the youth had proved himself susceptible to no claims of virtue or humanity, and, as a last stroke of evil, had seduced his sister from an honorable life, further pity seems sentimentalism. Before the boy's first departure his father had warned him that he would take no part in any ill-won prosperity, and if misfortunes came, they, too, must be borne alone. The foreign phrases are on the father's lips this time, as the sightless cripple creeps up to the farm-house door. He runs over the proud speeches that have thus ended in shame and misery; nor will he listen to the entreaties for shelter, even as a beggar, for a single night. "'Every one, the country round, is cruel to me; alas! so you are now. In God's name give me the charity you would give a poor sick man!'" But the farmer "laughed scoffingly, even though it broke his heart, for this was his own flesh, his child, who stood there before him blind." He struck the boy who was leading the wretch, and drove them off. "Yet as they went away his mother put a loaf of bread in his hand, as if he were a child." For a year he crawled about, skulking in the woods and living on what he might. Then one day, having wandered to the scene of some of his worst crimes, a set of peasants catch sight of him, and recount to one another what their farms, their babes, their daughters, had suffered from this outlaw and his band. As they talk they tremble with hate and rage, and, catching up a rope, they fulfil the last of the dreams that tormented the anxious night of the father just before his son rode out, with his rich clothes and fine horse and wonderful hood covering that long, beautiful hair, to seek his fortune in a court.

Why is it worth while to introduce to English readers this peasant tale of the middle ages? Not on account of its antiquarian value, though it is full of interesting suggestions of old manners. Nor primarily on account of its literary significance, notwithstanding the tact and nervous directness of Wernher's style, and the heightened realism of treatment that gives him distinction beside the romanticists of the time. Its main importance for us lies in that sense of the human unity which we derive from such a story of a time so remote from our own, and in most of its aspects so different. Many of the influences that render man's life desirable--organized society, with respect for property and personal safety, ease of living, humanitarian sensibility even to the guiltiest suffering--we miss, and missing them we rejoice in the progress of our age toward the light. But the traits whereby life in all ages becomes estimable--simplicity of character, contentment with the station of one's birth, if only one can live there with dignity and usefulness; frugality, integrity, natural love which grows most tender and yearning when the kinship of moral worthiness seems in danger of dissolution--are our own best possession, and this identity of manhood then and now makes us feel less strange among those distant and dimly remembered generations. Thus serious writers offer to our study many notable and interesting thoughts, and in their courtly poets we find scores of delightful pictures of gracious and noble dames and knights moving through the pleasures and pains of an ideal world. It is also pleasant to listen to a poet from among the people, and to touch the rough hand of an old German farmer, whose most brilliant recollection was of the time when, as a boy, he carried eggs and cheese to one of the courts of old-fashioned chivalry; whose virtue cast in a decadent era had looked at life sternly, yet whose austerity was softened by a homely simplicity through whose grace he grew old, with his heart true to his plain home life and his family, even to the assurance that no drink could be more refreshing than water from the spring on his own farm.

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTE:

[9] "La pluye nous a debuez et lavez, Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz; Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez, Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz."

[Decoration]

CHILDHOOD IN MEDIÆVAL LITERATURE.

When Homer described the pretty fright of Astyanax in his nurse's arms, amid the parting of Hector and Andromache; when Vergil made Damon recall the day when, as a little boy just able to reach up to the branches, he saw his mother and the child who was to be his fate gathering apples--the hyacinths of Theocritus were daintier--they struck two chords of feeling, one charming, the other deeper and richer, which have started vibrations whenever they have met a sympathetic reader ever since. Because we are susceptible to the poetry of childhood we are pleased to find that these ancient poets also cared for it. It adds a personal touch to our feeling for them. It gives us a thrill of the immortality of heart and its simplest, purest sentiment. There may be an element of the fictitious in our feeling about childhood. Heaven may not be about our infancy, those "sweet early days" may not have been "as long as twenty days are now"; and they may not have been the types of innocence, simplicity, the loveliness of the race taken at first hand from nature, which we fancy them. But there is something beyond a fallacy in this sentiment; it is in our purer and more refined moods that we are sensitive to it. Like a whiff of spring smoke, or woodsy odors, a reminder of our early life will sometimes throw us into a revery which is more than recollection. No one can write well about children without sensibility to youthful emotion and some love for family life. Whoever looks back with genial wistfulness upon his own early days, and enjoys renewing them in the playthings of his fancy, can hardly be without a vein of quiet refinement. When an age listens with pleasure to such sketches, it is not barren of the homely affections, nor uniformly given over to restless and unlawful passions. As one wanders through the poetry of the middle ages, one observes the frequency with which it mentions children.

These passages, judged absolutely, may not be remarkable for insight or tenderness, but in those days all emotional subjects were treated crudely. Yet they are often interesting for themselves, and they show a fact which many seem to question that the sentiments of simple family life were felt by poets and people. So much has been written by critics upon the worse side of the society of chivalry, that it is well to recognize this other aspect of its affections. The public has frequently been assured that those days knew nothing of true family sentiment. How much truth there is in the statement that fashionable love disregarded marriage, has been shown in a preceding essay. But on _a priori_ grounds we should disbelieve that general society was permeated by artificial gallantry. Even were the testimony of lyrical lovers uniform, we must recollect how conventional all their love-poetry was; most poets composed on formal lines impersonally, in spite of their pronouns. One of the troubadours, indeed, denied that this was possible when the husband of his theme challenged him, in the lonely place where he was hunting, by his liege truth to tell him whether he had a lady love. "Sire," he replied, "how could I sing unless I loved?" But in most poems there was more business, or ambitious art, than nature. A large number of these poets impress us as having just as little emotional veracity in writing as had Cowley in _The Mistress_. Moreover, even if a school of poetry, not conventionalized, should treat romantic and sensational sentiment to the exclusion of domestic, it would prove nothing. What if cynical critics some centuries hence should give Mr. Coventry Patmore a place in their encyclopedias, simply on the ground that he was an exception to the nineteenth-century belief that love ended at the bridal altar? Possibly by that time love, poetry, and fiction may deal mainly with domestic emotions after marriage, and then our own romances will very likely appear strange.

From one point of view those centuries were too akin to undeveloped life to be prepared to represent it. Europe seven hundred years ago seems like a vast nursery abandoned by its governess. The people are like children of various ages and sizes, degrees of education, and innate sense of right and wrong. Children are impulsive, passionate, selfish, brutally inconsiderate; they are sometimes religious too. We find apparently sporadic susceptibility to isolation and prayer. They cry at trifles, and while their cheeks are still wet, they are smiling. Bright and simple things please them; they are fickle and impatient; they love lively music; when they are tired playing, nothing pleases them like a story--they listen intently, credulously. When spring comes they can no more help running and dancing over the grass, than sunbeams on a brook. The gentler sit in the meadow making posies, while the rougher are setting traps, and racing, and fighting: but sometimes the rough boys will come and play in the meadow, and be pleasant to the girls. All these traits of children apply to the mediæval character, their barbarisms, their ethical inconsistencies, their delight in stories (no age has ever cared more for story telling), their love of play, their passion for spring, and the rest.

Undoubtedly the popular impression gives the period too little joyousness. Mercurial childhood has capacity for sudden pleasures even when life goes ill, and life frequently went very well even then. But the mystery and grace of motherhood and dawning life are likely to appeal to a calmer and more retrospective age. The seriousness that takes pleasure in contemplating childhood is more serene and pensive than the usual moods of an era undeveloped emotionally. So it would not be a matter for surprise if the literary remains of those days had left us mainly incidental references to children.

Of such plain facts we have many, such as, for instance, that the little ones were entertained with pet dogs, birds, and squirrels (apparently never with cats), mice harnessed to a toy wagon, clay or wooden images of animals, and tiny vessels after kitchen models, toy men, women, and children, tops, and marbles; that they played blind man's buff, and many games attended with songs. As early as the interesting Latin poem called _Waltharius et Hiltgunde_, which at least in a popular version Walther von der Vogelweide liked, we find the hero appealing to Hagen, by the memory of the boyish games with which they had whiled away their childhood, and over which they never had quarrelled.

We obtain considerable information about customs of education also; such as the attention paid to languages (a girl in a French romance is said to have understood fourteen tongues), and Isolde knew French and Latin as well as Irish. Boys were sent off on their travels early, going especially to Paris. Weinhold's quotation from Hugo von Trimberg illustrates the dangers that beset the pursuit of culture even then: "Many boys go to Paris; they learn little and spend much. But yet no doubt they see Paris."

When Sir Philip Sidney derided the contemporary drama's habit of carrying a play through a large part of the hero's lifetime, instead of restricting the action to a developed episode, he made a poor criticism, out of tune, as are other parts of his criticism, with the genius of Elizabethan poetry. But the passage is interesting as a reminder of the relation to that great literature of the romances which runs back through the middle ages to the later Greek writings. Such narrations as the _Daphnis and Chloe_, and the _Aethiopica_, introduce their central characters while they are still children, and whether through transmitted influence or independently, the same course is pursued by the most important romance poems of mediæval France and Germany. To this practice we owe pleasant domestic scenes of many a hero's early life, and sometimes, indeed, a narration of early joys and sorrows of his parents' love. The _Tristan_ of Gottfried von Strassburg, for example, begins well before the birth of its subject, with noteworthy romantic episodes. This brilliant poem's account of the early years of chivalry's typical fine gentleman illustrates the admiration paid to intellectual training at a time when polite society in general was not well educated. Tristan spent his first seven years under the care of his foster-mother, learning various lessons of good behavior; after that Rual li Foitenant provided a master, and sent him off to acquire foreign languages in their own lands, and "book-learning" as well. The luxurious temper of his chronicler stops for a long sigh at the hardship of such training, through the years when joyousness is at its best. So it is, he exclaims in his studied style, with many youth; when life is in its first bloom and freedom, away they are constrained to go from its free blossom. For seven years this young prince was constantly kept busy with the exercises of arms and horsemanship, in addition to his formal studies; he also learned hunting, and all courtly arts, especially music. Then he was called home to be prepared for his political career. The education of children was assisted by not a few treatises on manners and morals, such as _Babees Books_, as the old English called them. They are usually manuals of etiquette, mediæval prototypes of such modern works as _Don't_. Chaucer's Prioress had evidently studied the sections on table proprieties, and her gentility, which was so tender-hearted, might well have been developed under the admonishments of the ethical passages which often accompanied them. For a tender age many of these precepts were depressing. One of the gravest and most mature of these works is called _Der Winsbeke_, with a sequel, _Die Winsbekin_, for girls, the advice of a twelfth-century Solomon, which moralizes certainly as well as most of its analogues. This stanza, for instance, shows a homely dignity:

That bright candle mark, my son, While it burns, it wastes away; So from thee thy life doth run, (I say true) from day to day. In thy memory let this dwell, And life here so rule, that then With thy soul it may be well. What though wealth exalt thy name? Only this shall follow thee-- A linen cloth to hide thy shame.

These gnomic writings, running into a developed didacticism, are illustrated by the song of Walther von der Vogelweide on the restraint of eye, ear, and tongue. Whether this poet was the teacher of the young King Henry, as some have thought, or gained his experience in humbler ways, he evidently knew the trials of the pedagogue. "Oh, you self-willed boy," he cries, "too small to be put to work in the field and too big to whip, have your own way and go to sleep." As for flogging, this prince of the minnesingers took the side of the Matthew Feildes against the Boyers: "No one can switch a child into education; to those whom you can bring up well, a word is as good as a blow." Apropos of the teacher's view, we also find the pupil's feeling for his teacher recorded in that little poem of the English school-boy, who was late in the morning, and explained to the master that his mother told him to stop and milk the ducks. The boy recounts the details of what follows, and afterwards, instead of taking up his interrupted studies, he words out a day-dream in which the master is turned into a hare, his books into hounds, and the boy goes hunting.

There is a grain of humor, too, at least for the modern reader, in a much more sentimental child-play of the minnesinger Hadlaub. Though he mainly echoes the love singers who wrote a hundred years before him, one of the first songs in the collection of his poems raises a hope of something more than the ordinary, though this only leads us on to disappointment through the rest of his fifty-odd pieces. There is something very natural about this picture of the lover catching sight of his disdainful fair one playing with a little child. "She reached out her arms and caught it close to her, she took its face between her white hands, and pressed it to her lips and mouth and lovely cheek; ah, how deliciously she kissed it!" What did the child do? "Just what I should have done; threw its arms around her, and was so happy." When she let the little one go, the lover went after it and kissed it just where her lips had been, "and how that went to my heart!" Poor fellow! "I serve her since we both were children," and this is the nearest apparently that he ever came to the seals of love.

But instead of delaying over estrays, pleasant scraps like those left us by Heinrich von Morungen, for instance, one of the few minnesingers for whom one really cares, we may pass on to three or four more detailed examples from the thirteenth century, of household love and sympathy with the poetry of childhood. But first I will translate a simple sesame for opening again the early gates. The poet is known as the Wild Alexander, but his mood was gentle and gracious when this revery of his boyhood came upon him:

There we children used to play, Thro' the meadows and away, Looking 'mid the grassy maze For the violets; those days Long ago Saw them grow; Now one sees the cattle graze.

I remember as we fared Thro' the blossoms, we compared Which the prettiest might be: We were little things, you see. On the ground Wreaths we bound;-- So it goes, our youth and we.

Over stick and stone we went Till the sunny day was spent; Hunting strawberries each skirrs From the beeches to the firs, Till--Hello, Children! Go Home, they cry--the foresters.

So he goes on to tell how their childhood took as a pleasure the hurts and stings that they received as they hunted for strawberries, and to recall the warnings against snakes that the herdsman sometimes shouted through the branches. Apart from its graceful manner, and the breezy freshness of its universal childhood, the poem's specific touches are unusual. "From the beeches to the firs," for instance, does not sound mediæval aside from one's surprise that a German should have omitted the linden. We need not be as old as was Lamb in 1820, to look back with a touch of desire on the child, that other me, there in the background. Perhaps there is the glamour of sentiment about that familiar association of childhood with purity and moral grace. Yet the feeling appeals to us as true beyond mere beauty, and many may read with responsiveness these lines, hitherto unprinted, by one on whose lips, just parted for their song, silence laid her finger:

"Could I answer love like thine, All earth to me were heaven anew; But were thy heart, dear child, as mine, What place for love between us two? Bright things for tired eyes vainly shine: A grief the pure heaven's simple blue. Alas, for lips past joy of wine, That find no blessing in God's dew! From dawning summits crystalline Thou lookest down; thou makest sign Toward this bleak vale I wander through. I cannot answer; that pure shrine Of childhood, though my love be true, Is hidden from my dim confine: I must not hope for clearer view. The sky, the earth, the wrinkled brine Would wear to me a fresher hue, And all once more be half-divine, Could I answer love like thine."

The spiritual subtlety of such a mood certainly is beyond the mediæval poets, yet we find pleasant proofs of sensibility to the tender, unselfish nature of a loving child. Nowhere in such detail, perhaps, as in the most familiar of Middle High German poems, the _Poor Henry_, of Hartmann von Aue. The story is known in Longfellow's _Golden Legend_. This is not the place to discuss that poem, which contains some charming passages. The poet's treatment may be far from satisfactory, yet when he calls his original the most beautiful of mediæval legends, he certainly shows a more satisfactory side of extreme estimate than does Goethe, in his curious fling at the poem (which we may notice he read in a modernized form). He says it gave him a "physico-æsthetic pain," and adds that the notion of a fine girl sacrificing herself for a leper, affected him so that he felt himself poisoned by the book. This judgment was pronounced in Goethe's later life, and is consistent with his habitual want of sympathy with mediæval romantic literature. It shows, moreover, a lack of historical adjustment, for the dreadful disease was so common in the twelfth century that its repulsiveness was blurred for Hartmann; yet he mentions it with the greatest reserve, though a description of its appearance could hardly be more painful than the famous conclusion of the _De Rerum Natura_. We are reminded of Goethe's visit to Assisi, interesting to him only as the situation of some remains of classical architecture.[10]

Hartmann von Aue ranks below his two great companions in German narrative poetry, for he is more of a translator than either Gottfried or Wolfram. His distinction is in his style; he has a very agreeable way of telling a story, and there is a quiet charm about his diction. "How clear and pure his crystal words are and always must be," is Gottfried's tribute. We come to feel a personal liking for him, through his unaffected interest in his characters, his unassuming ways and the tact by which he lightens or deepens his accentuation. We feel that he was a gentleman, and we do not wonder at the kind regard in which all his fellow poets held him. We like his refined moral seriousness and that calm temperament of which he speaks in _Gregorius_. The original for the _Arme Heinrich_ is lost, but though his introduction claims for himself no merit beyond a careful selection out of the many books that he takes pains to tell us he was learned enough to read for himself, we are probably justified in feeling that he took his heart into partnership when he made the version, receiving from it touches that he did not find in the earlier treatment. To appreciate the poem we have to put ourselves into harmony with the wonder-loving, credulous, and mystically religious world of seven hundred years ago. Hartmann's simple earnestness and unobtrusive tenderness and piety constitute an ideal manner for the legend, and that ease of his soul which he hoped would come through the prayers of those who read the poem after his death, is perhaps equally well secured if he knows how some of his verses touch the sophisticated sense of to-day. He said that he was actuated in writing by the desire to soften hard hours in a way that would be to the honor of God, and by which he might make himself dear to others. He has succeeded. It is to the honor of God, and it wins the affection of others, when a poet leads his readers to a little well of pure unselfish love, hedged about by a child's religious faith.