Part 14

Heloise had been a nun some sixteen years when some one showed her Abelard's so-called _Historia Calamitatum_. Apparently her husband had forbidden her to write to him; but though she had kept a long silence, she was a lover until death. This account of Abelard's sufferings and perils broke her constraint; she could not help writing to comfort him and to beg for news of his safety. What other love-letters equal the intensity, the tenderness, the womanliness of these final appeals for the broken love? Through their nervous pliancy one may learn as nowhere else the reality of Browning's

"Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn."

In them appears also her strength of nature; they are the love-calls of a woman who knows that the man she continues to set far above all the rest of humanity is wronging her. She chides him for this long and complete neglect, but there is a marvellous sweetness in her caressing reproaches. She tells him to remember under what peculiar bonds she holds him,--what sacred obligation of marriage, of love, and of devotion he owes to her; she gave her honor to please him, not herself; she sacrificed her tender age to the harshness of a monastic life not from piety, but only in submission to his desire. "There was a time," she writes, "when people doubted whether in our amour I yielded to love or to passion. But the end shows how I began; to please you, I have denied myself all pleasures." She points out to him how differently the end interprets his feeling for her. "It is common talk," she says, "that you felt only gross emotions toward me, and when there was a stop to their indulgence, your so-called love vanished. My dearest one, would that this appeared to me only, and not to every one; would that I might be soothed by hearing others excuse you, or that I could myself devise excuses."

She appears to entertain no hope that he will visit her, though she hints longingly at the possibility; but he can at least do as much for her as he does for others under obligations so far slighter, as much as the example of the church fathers regarding the women of their flocks teaches him to do,--he can write and tell her how he is, he can comfort her love: or (and she appeals to the monk who may listen, even if the old-time lover will not) he can send spiritual admonition to uphold her slipping soul. Her heart put at rest, she can be so much freer for the divine service. "When you wooed me for the pleasures of earth," she reminds him, "you sent me letter after letter; with many songs you put your Heloise in the speech of all, so that every street and house echoed with me. How much more ought you now to excite toward God the one whom then you aroused to sin."

She tells him again of her complete absorption in him: "You are the only one who can make me either sad or happy; you only can be my comforter. The whole world knows how much I loved you," and she turns with a half-shuddering reminiscence to the day she became a nun. "It was for you, not for God--that sacrifice. From God I can look for no reward; consider, then, how vain my trial, if by it I win nothing from you"; and the woman for sixteen years a nun calls God--and remember that hers was the God of mediæval superstition--to witness that she would have followed Abelard, or gone before him, if she had seen him hastening to hell.

Her letters evidently moved the monk, for his replies were full of good advice, and under the surface gave some indications of tender regard. But the affection that we find is colorless and formal. No word of a husband's gentleness, nor warmth of phrase, not a hint that he cherishes happy memories of the old days of their union. They are the letters of an old man, absorbed in himself, worn by the world, who has no capacity for anything deeper than kind feeling. He calls her his sister, once dear in the world, now dearer in Christ, begs her prayers for him living and dead, and entreats that whenever he may die she will have his body carried to her abbey, that the constant sight of his grave may move her and her spiritual daughters to pray for his salvation. He gulps down the _Lachrima Christi_ of her exquisite love as if it were the small beer of pietistic commonplace, and then looks disappointed to find that it was not. For he ignores the soul of her letters, and composes complacent treatises of twelfth-century ecclesiastical discipline designed to subject her to a mechanical and lifeless asceticism.

Heloise in answer reproaches him for his talk of death, like a brave heart bidding him not by anticipation suffer before his time. The knowledge of her husband's unhappiness is a renewed affliction, and she owns that there is nothing but sorrow in her life. Like a daring Titaness, she exclaims against God's administration of his world:

"While we lived in sin, he indulged us; when we married, he forced us to separate. Let his other creatures rejoice and count themselves safe from the inclement clemency of the God whom I almost dare to call cruel to me in every way. They are safe, for upon me he has used up all the weapons of his wrath, so that he has none with which to rage at others; nor, if any remained, could he find a place in me wherein to strike them."

After sixteen years' silence, this woman has broken into speech, and unmasked confessions of her inner spirit will no longer be restrained. She goes on as if carried by cyclone winds; she tells her far-off lover what few nuns under terror of eternal death can ever have brought themselves to confide to their confessors in scarcely audible whisper. She calls up the scenes of their union; she confesses that visions of that life are with her constantly: she bemoans the thoughts which "haunt me sometimes, even at the holy mass." She was no calm northern woman; she had nothing of the temperament that Shakespeare compared to an icicle

"That's curdied by the frost from purest snow, And hangs on Dian's temple";

she was made to walk with love, under summer moonlight,--no sister of Percivale, to forget thwarted desire in prayer beneath the frosty stars of winter.

"Help me," cries this victim of a gloomy religion, "for I do not find how by penance to appease God, whom I still accuse of the greatest cruelty. It is easy to confess and to torture the body; it is hard to tear the soul from its desires. My mind keeps the same wish for sin; so sweet was our happiness that I cannot be sorry for it. Most wretched life, if I have endured so much in vain, destined to have no recompense hereafter."

Thus Heloise the woman and Heloise the abbess fight out the old problem whether the training of life is by the use of its gifts, or by the rejection of them; shall we play the full organ, or only the harsh reed stops? The church taught her to condemn what nature taught her to justify. The religious authority of all the dark ages confronted this woman's instincts of life, and--to her honor--it could not quell them. Yet conceive her wretchedness and the anguish of her mental struggle, living as she did in the middle of Catholic mediævalism. When, after a scanty rest, she left her cell at midnight, this artificial conscience attended her to the long chapel service that followed, pointed at the austere pages over which she bent in the study when the service was over, kept calling her hypocrite as she chided and instructed the nuns whom she is said to have ruled so wisely, snatched food and wine from her hungry lips, with fast, pitiless lashing wielded the whip of penance, haunted her sleep with its stern face. Yet the pleasures of time were still honorable to her; the world _was_ good; her love _had_ been beautiful; if her conscience prayed forgiveness for it, her heart sang, because she had known it.

To hear this bewildered voice crying to Abelard for his prayers because in spite of the world's praise of her virtue she thinks herself a hypocrite,--Oh, my only one, pray for me, for I cannot be sorry that we loved--to hear this makes one glad that the time has passed for identifying the devil with the world's laughter, and God with its sobbing.

She lived on as abbess of the Paraclete for twenty-one years after she buried her husband. We cannot believe that as one set of feelings cooled with age, her spiritual emotions grew more impulsive. In the twenty-eight years which followed her last letter to Abelard, she no doubt more and more mechanically went through the life of monastic duty, her intellectual accord with the church leading her to an increasingly calm performance of routine piety, her heart more and more silent--but never dead. We fancy its main utterance an anticipation of that cry of Clough's--"Submit, submit." Thus kindling with no spiritual ardor--(she once confessed that her religious ambition did not rise so high as to wish a crown of victory, or to have God's strength made perfect in her weakness), she lived out her faithful and successful life as abbess of the Paraclete, comforted--we may hope--by a continuance of the intellectual consolations of her youth, and honored, as we know, by church and world. If imaginary biography is ever safe we may employ it here, and fancy that when she came to die she repeated what she had said years before, that she should be quite content to be given just a corner in heaven. I think as she lay waiting to be received there, she dreamed of looking up from it, not at the ineffable glory, but at one human face stationed highest among the masters in divine philosophy. Highest among the masters! Less than a hundred and fifty years later, the great poem of mediævalism forgot to give Abelard a place even among the penitents of purgatory, and to-day except by special students he is remembered only as Heloise's unworthy lover.

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FOOTNOTES:

[13] _Petri Abælardi Historia Calamitatum. Petri Abælardi et Heloissæ Epistolæ._

[14] _Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit_, iii., 14-34.

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APPENDIX.

At the suggestion of the publishers the following brief notices of some of the works and authors mentioned in these essays are added for convenience of reference.

ÆTHIOPICA, the oldest and most famous of the Greek romances. It narrates the loves of Theagenes and Charicleia, and was written in his youth by Heliodorus of Emesa, who flourished about the end of the fourth century, and died as Bishop of Tricca in Thessaly.

ALEXANDER, or as he is termed in some MSS. the Wild Alexander. A South-German poet of the thirteenth century. Of his life scarcely anything is known.

CHRESTIEN DE TROYES, a French trouvère, who flourished in the second half of the twelfth century. He may be regarded as the popularizer in the French form of the cycle of tales that centre about the Round Table. The most important of his poems is the one bearing the title, _Perceval le Gallois_ or _Li Contes del Graal_.

COMTE DE CHAMPAGNE.--See Thibaut.

ARNAUD DANIEL, a Provençal poet, who died about 1189. He was distinguished for the complicated character of his versification, and in particular was the inventor of the verse called the _sestine_. He lived for some time at the court of Richard I. of England. Dante in the twenty-sixth canto of the _Purgatory_ puts him at the head of all the Provençal poets. He was also highly praised by Petrarch.

DAPHNIS AND CHLOE, a Greek pastoral romance, the prototype of all the pastoral romances which have been written in various languages. Its composition is usually ascribed to a certain Longus, a Greek sophist, who flourished about the beginning of the fifth century.

FREIDANK, the composer of a Middle High German didactic poem, which belongs to the first half of the thirteenth century. The name has been considered by some to be merely allegorical. His work, which was entitled _Bescheidenheit_, consists of over four thousand verses and discusses religious, political and social questions. It was an exceedingly popular work during the Middle Ages.

GACES BRULLES, a French trouvère of the early part of the thirteenth century. He was born in Champagne, but spent a portion of his life in Brittany. About seventy of his _chansons_ are extant.

GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG, a German poet who flourished at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. His great work was the epic entitled _Tristan und Isolde_, continued by others after his death. This took place somewhere between 1210 and 1220. Gottfried wrote also many lyric poems.

GUILLAUME DE BALAUN (or BALAZUN), a Provençal poet of the twelfth century. He was the lover of the lady of Joviac, in the Gévaudan. Alienation having sprung up between them upon account of his assumed or real indifference, his mistress would not restore him to favor unless he should agree to extract the nail of the longest finger of his right hand, and should come and present it to her with a poem composed expressly for the occasion. The condition was fulfilled.

JOHANN HADLAUB, a German poet, who flourished at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. His life was spent mainly in Zurich. His compositions were principally love-songs and popular songs dealing with the pleasures of autumn and harvest. A statue was erected to him in Zurich in 1885.

HARTMANN VON AUE, a Middle High German, belonging by birth to a noble Swabian family, was born about 1170, and died between 1210 and 1220. He wrote _Erec and Enide_, basing it upon the French poem with the same title of Chrestien de Troyes. Another poem of his belonging also to the Arthurian cycle is _Iwein_. The most popular of his works with modern students is _Der arme Heinrich_. The details of its story have been made known to English readers by Longfellow's _Golden Legend_, which is founded upon it. Another work of his is entitled _Gregorius vom Stein_.

HEINRICH VON MORUNGEN, a German minnesinger, a knight of Thuringia, who flourished at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. His last years were spent at the court of Meissen. He wrote many love-songs, many of which owe their existence to those of the troubadours.

HEINRICH VON VELDEKE, a German poet of the twelfth century, who was of a noble family settled near Maastricht, on the lower Rhine. Besides the love-songs and other pieces he wrote, he was the composer of the epic of the _Eneide_, the first poem of the Middle High German epic poetry, which reached its highest development in the writings of Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg.

HUGO VON TRIMBERG, a German poet, who flourished at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. From 1260 to 1309 he was rector of the collegiate school in the Theuerstadt, a suburb of Bamberg. He is known as the composer of the _Renner_, a didactic poem, in which the manners and customs of the time are largely depicted, and the prevailing vices severely censured.

JACOPO DA TODI, or JACOPONE, an Italian poet, born about the middle of the thirteenth century at Todi, in the duchy of Spoleto. He belonged to the noble family of the Benedetti, began life as an advocate, but, on account of the sudden accidental death of his wife, devoted himself to a religious life and entered the order of Franciscans. He wrote many religious poems in Italian, and also in Latin. To him in particular is ascribed the composition of the famous _Stabat Mater Dolorosa_.

NEIDHART VON REUENTHAL, a German lyric poet of the thirteenth century. He was of a noble Bavarian family, but spent part of his life in Austria. His poems were written between 1210 and 1240, and are of special interest for the descriptions they give of the customs of the times.

THIBAUT, COUNT OF CHAMPAGNE AND KING OF NAVARRE. He was born at Troyes in 1201, and died in 1253. He is one of the most noted of the early French poets.

ULRICH VON LIECHTENSTEIN, a Middle High German poet, born about 1200, and died in 1276. He was the author of the poem entitled _Frauendienst_, described in this volume, and also of a didactic poem called _Frauenbuch_.

WALTHARIUS ET HILTGUNDE, or simply Waltharius, a Latin poem of the tenth century in hexameter verse, and consisting of between fourteen hundred and fifteen hundred lines. Its authorship is unknown.

WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE, the greatest German poet of the Middle Ages. He was born about 1160, and died about 1230. He was of a knightly family, though poor, and much of his life was spent at the courts of several German princes and emperors. He wrote not only love-poems, but in the contest that went on between the imperialists and the papacy, he supported the side of the former in patriotic verses which had no slight influence upon contemporary opinion. Both for matter and manner he stood at the head of the poets called minnesingers.

WERNHER THE GARDENER, a German poet of the thirteenth century, who composed, between 1234 and 1250, the story of _Meier Helmbrecht_. Nothing is known with certainty of his life.

WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH, a German poet, of noble birth, of the latter half of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth. He died about 1220. His greatest work is the _Parzival_, which was completed about 1210. It was founded, according to his own statement, partly upon the _Conte del Graal_ of Chrestien de Troyes, but more particularly upon the work of a poet whom he calls Kyot, who is supposed by some to be Guyot de Provins, whose romance of _Perceval_, not extant, is assumed to be the original of Wolfram's poem. Another of his poems was the unfinished _Titurel_, which contains the tale of the love of Schionatulander and Sigune.

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Transcriber's Notes:

Spelling and punctuation errors have been repaired.

Ellipses in poetry have been spaced to preserve appearance of the original; all other ellipses are standardized.

Colons after "Liechtenstein" and "Helmbrecht" on Contents page, and variant punctuation after the same terms in Chapter headings, were retained.

P. 21, (cp. Inf., 14, 30; 24, 5) in original "24" was at the end of a line, and "5" at the beginning of the next, with no punctuation between.

P. 47 original "midst of his prostestations" changed to "midst of his protestations."

P. 76 original "reficient" changed to "reficiant."

P. 92 original "merry-makings" changed to more frequent "merrymakings."

P. 93 original "Wezerant. He" changed to "Wezerant.' He" (single quote added).

P. 116 Hey[=a], [=a] indicates lower case "a" with macron. (Text version only).

P. 132 The change in indentation in the poetry, beginning at "Thou lookest down," is faithful to the original.

P. 174 "sister's thin chanting" changed to "sisters' thin chanting."

P. 184 original "Tristran und Isolde" changed to "Tristan und Isolde."

P. 187 original "von Lichtenstein" changed to more frequent "von Liechtenstein."

The following variant spellings were used in the original equally, and were retained: god-father and godfather, riband and ribband, rose-bushes (second use is quoting the first=1 use) and rosebush, Wendel and Wentel, "Arnaud Daniel" and "Arnaut Daniel," Aethiopica and Æthiopica, Jacapone and Jacopone, sestine and sestina.