Part 7

Another cries: "Bring me my fine gown. The gentleman from Reuenthal has sung us a new song. I hear him singing there to the children. I must dance with him at the linden." Her mother warns her of what happened to her playmate Jiute last year, "just as her mother said." But the gentleman had sent her a lovely garland of roses, and had brought her a pair of red stockings from over the Rhine, which she was wearing then; and she had promised to let him teach her the dance. Another song represents two girls talking of the same knight from Reuenthal: "All know him, and his songs are heard everywhere. He loves me, and to please him I will lace myself trimly, and go."

Some of the mothers do more than remonstrate: "The wood is well in leaf, but my mother will not let me go. She has tied my feet with a rope. But all the same, I must go with the children to the linden in the field." Her mother overheard and threatened to punish her. "You little grasshopper, whither wilt thou hop away from the nest? Sit and sew in the sleeve for me." The girl is impudent, and the poem ends with a lively contest.

Love is too strong. "He kissed me," one of them says, "and he had some root in his mouth, so that I lost all my senses." Perhaps the high-born poet bewitched these peasant-girls; he often assures us of it. One of them is plighted to a farmer, and whenever he expects to find her at home to entertain him, she joins the dancers, as toward evening "they bend their way down the street," and throws her ball to the knightly singer. Even the mothers themselves are sometimes caught by the desire to dance with him, or at least with some of the men at the linden, and in two or three of Neidhart's sprightliest songs the tables are turned, and the daughter tries to keep her mother from the gaieties that her years have outgrown. I have translated two of these summer dance songs in their exact rhythms, and so literally as to make them appear almost bald. In the first the nature opening may be omitted.

"Mother, do not deny me,-- Forth to the field I'll hie me, And dance the merry spring; 'Tis ages since I heard the crowd Any new carols sing."

"Nay, daughter, nay, mine own, Thee I have all alone Upon my bosom carried; Now yield thee to thy mother's will, And seek not to be married."

"If I could only show him! Why, mother dear, you know him, And to him I will haste; Ah, 'tis the knight of Reuenthal, And he shall be embraced.

"Such green the branches bending! The leafy weight seems rending The trees so thickly clad: Now be assured, dear mother mine, I'll take the worthy lad.

"Dear mother, with such burning After my love he's yearning, Ungrateful can I be? He says that I'm the prettiest From France to Germany."

Bare we saw the fields, but that is over; Now the flowers are crowding thro' the clover; At length the season that we love is here: As last year, All the heath is caught and held by roses; To roses summer brings good cheer.

Thrushes, nightingales, we hear them singing; With their loud music mount and dale are ringing: For the dear summer is their jubilee: To you and me, It brings bright sights and pleasures without number; The heath is a fair thing to see.

"Dewy grow the meadows," cried a maiden, "Branches lately bare are greenly laden: Listen! how the birds are crowning May: Come and play, For, Wierat, the leaves are on the linden; Winter, I ween, has gone away.

"This year, too, we'll dance till twilight closes; Near the wood is a great mass of roses, I'll have a garland of them, trimly made; Come, you jade, Hand in hand with a fine knight you'll see me Dance in the linden shade."

"Little daughter, heed not his advances; If thou press among the knights at dances, Something not befitting such as we There will be Trouble coming to thee, little daughter-- And the young farmer thinks of thee."

"Nay, I trust to rule a knight in armor; How then should I listen to a farmer? What! you think I'd be a peasant's bride!" She replied: "He could never woo me to my liking, He'll never marry me," she cried.

At first Neidhart seems to have maintained friendly relations with the young men of the district, for we find him addressing in amicable terms even Engelmar, who later became his worst enemy, complimenting him upon his room, in a song apparently designed for a dance at his house. But it is difficult to believe that his critical genius would have gone long without expression, and he presently began amusing himself, and courting the admirations of others, by original snatches of songs that were imitated from the _trutzstrophen_ of humorous, rustic, and often roughly personal verses, that were evidently in vogue among the country people before Neidhart's day. Such jeering, gibing bits of peasant fun-making would grow out of the custom of songs at these rural gatherings, like the parallel practice sometimes found with us of country valentine-parties, where personalities are touched off with the freedom of anonymous and privileged license. We can readily imagine him beginning with hits at one and another, that contained no deeper offence than an inevitable tone of his amused sense of the ridiculous. But the country gallants, already jealous of their elegant rival, whose gentlemanly prestige and courtly accomplishments would naturally make him attractive to their sweethearts, would be quick to take umbrage, and boorishly ready to manifest their displeasure. Neidhart certainly enjoyed at least as much of the poetic dower as "the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn," and must have answered their sullenness and rudeness with the contempt that falls with such a sting from gentility. Then stung himself by their bad manners, he naturally composed sharper and more direct stanzas, holding those who had offended him up to the laughter of other men, and of the tittering damsels. It does not seem probable that the most cutting and individualized of these attacks were written to be sung at dances where the victims of the satire were present. When we consider the violence and recklessness that historically marked this whole class in the thirteenth century, we are sure that the poet would hardly have survived some of the recitations. Many of them he probably composed to gratify his possibly irritated mood; for, as we shall presently see, his displeasure was deeper than the vexation of wounded social pride. But they strayed easily to the objects of their ridicule. As he strolled along the street, carrying his fiddle, and stopping to amuse himself at one house or another with any of the pretty girls whom he found idle like himself, he may have played and sung the piece over which he had just been working, or the minor singers who must have haunted him as he grew better known, would catch up and repeat far and wide the witty verses. The piece at which he was working, I said, for in an important sense the poems were professional labor. The natural comparison of the minnesinger on his farm to Ovid among the Goths, loses most of its force when we reflect that Neidhart's absences from his various little Romes were in some sense at his own pleasure, and that he must have kept riding about from castle to castle, and have made frequent sojourns at his patron's court, in the exercise of his now established musical vocation. The better his songs, the surer his hold on the Duke's favor, and as his prestige might rise throughout the country, the more cordial his greeting would be, and the more generous his dismission whenever he chose to go. These mediæval poets were more than careless rhymsters: painstaking labor was assumed as necessary for success. Their poetry was as subtle and difficult as the schoolmen's philosophy; though we may not care much for either, we at least respect the skill with which they mastered self-enforced technical difficulties. Arnaut Daniel's contest for a wager with another troubadour (King Richard was to decide which produced the cleverer poem), illustrates the statement that time was thought necessary for composition. The Provençal biography tells us that the contestants were shut up in separate rooms, and only ten days were allowed each for preparing his song. In Neidhart's seclusion on his fief, then, he would naturally make studies for his more important literary appearances, studies in subject-matter, as well as in verse and music. And a large number of his poems, at least considered in their entirety, must be thought of as compositions intended for courtly audiences.

It is to be presumed that Neidhart began by writing in the conventional style of the love-singers. But his sense of humor and his originality were too vigorous to allow him to continue in the polished and monotonous manners of the school that reached its acme in Reinmar. He possessed the creative faculty, and the rude village lyrics were a sufficient suggestion of the new departure that he at once instituted and consummated. He put in the place of lyrical elegies, lyrical snatches of epic; and instead of gathering his epic materials from the already familiar, even if not hackneyed, cycles of chivalry, he took them from the real life, and that a growing life, of the German villagers of his time. Their boorish manners and arrogant social pretensions, their vulgar assumptions of elegance, and their jealous, recklessly brutal tempers, he sketches vividly. His touch is not to be called magical, there are no imaginative hauntings about the poems, there is little fascination of subtle poetry in his expression or his melodies. But his rude subjects are by no means treated rudely; he shows excellent technique in those elaborately built stanzas; his tone rather deepens than shrills in excited movements: in his dash and energy of feeling, he retains artistic self-possession; while he is such an iconoclast of sentimental poetry, that some have thought that Walther had him in mind in his complaint of the new school. He invariably shows sentiment for nature in his preludes, as well as sympathetic tones for character, especially in what we may call his personal confessions. It is indeed by virtue of this combination of qualities, as well as by his novelty of subject, that he caught the approval of his age. Romantic idealism was dying out, and a long period of coarse sensibility was drawing on; while there was yet still some feeling for sentiment, and an intellectual appreciation of artistic performance was, as usual, lapping over the first stages of literary decadence. If we accept the view which I have suggested, that at least as wholes many of Neidhart's songs were intended only for the gentry, we may find it easier to meet the question of their autobiographic and actual significance.

It is possible to be unduly literal and too credulous of the historic reality of whatever is found in an old literature. Especially in the works of the minnesingers, some modern Germans appear unconscious that a poet may relate fictitious experiences and sensations. As I have remarked in an earlier essay, Cowley's love-poems had many mediæval prototypes, and there seems no necessity for assuming a fact behind each of Neidhart's statements. Why is it not reasonable to suppose that having once made what we call a "strike" with some of his village characters, he occasionally invented continuations or parallels? We may go so far as to assert the possibility that the continual reappearances of Engelmar, Neidhart's most recurrent character, who is always associated with the beginning of his disasters, is due quite as much to the fact that his early treatment of the famous snatching of a girl's mirror proved, by virtue of the topic, or the melody, or both, a great favorite, as to the incident in itself having been of the fateful influence upon his life that is implied. In other cases, as in what we may term the episode of the ginger-root, Neidhart certainly seems to be referring to some of his most popular earlier songs, for no other reason than that the reference would be agreeable to his audience and give a sort of continuity to his work. One of these instances is almost pathetic. The poet is old and song comes hard to him. After several stanzas of unusually serious tone, he says that people ask him why he does not sing as they are told he once did: they keep wondering what has become of the peasants who used to be on Tulnaere-field. So he attempts to conclude with a strain of his old satirical gaiety. "I'll tell of the bold free ways of Limizun, who is yet worse than our friend who took Friderun's mirror, or those who bought mail awhile ago at Vienna," as if by the mention of these popular achievements of his younger wit he could hide his dull present mood.

So, too, as it appears to me, we may explain the recurrent complaints of his unhappy loves and of his desires frustrated by one and another of the boors. These lover's sorrows are just what we should expect from a poet in Neidhart's relation to the fashionable love lyrics; he retains something of the tone of despondent yearning that was deemed requisite by all his predecessors, yet he gives it a piquant novelty by substituting irony and class animosities for vague and impersonal wailings, and the sense of humor in these courtly woes in behalf of mere peasant maidens would be a livelier attraction to the knights and ladies of his polite circles than we might suppose. Surely Neidhart was the victim of no deep passion for his rustic heroines. He may have been amused by them, or even have liked them, and he certainly was enraged at being interfered with or baffled by middle-class rivals; but his rôle is more a Lothario's than a true lass-lorn wooer's. Imagine a peasant farm-house with a large main apartment, such as Neidhart had in mind in one of his earliest winter songs: "Engelmar, thy room is good; chill is it in the dales: winter is hateful." The young farmers and the girls come trooping in by pairs and little groups, dressed in their best, smiling and gay: no better aid to imagining the scene could be desired than Defregger's genial picture of a modern Tyrolese peasant party. It is a change from the summer dances: "Winter, thy might will drive us indoors from the broad linden. Thy winds are cold. Lark, quit thy singing: both frost and snow have said thee nay; alas, for the green clover. May, to thee I am loyal; winter is my bane." "Winter gives joy to none but such as love the chimney-corner." They all think of the change from their summer gatherings, and the singer strums his fiddle and strikes into the nature prelude of his lyric, as they prepare to begin the dance. Here is another opening, translated in the stanza system of the original:

The green grass and the flowers Both are gone; Before the sun the linden gives no shade; Those happy hours On shady lawn Of various joys are over; where we played, None may play; No paths stray Where we went together; Joy fled away at the winter weather, And hearts are sad which once were gay.

We are reminded again of Herrick in his lines to the meadows:

"Ye have been fresh and green, Ye have been fill'd with flowers; And ye the walks have been, Where maids have spent their hours."

The dance is under way now; if, as sometimes happened, they paid a surprise visit, the guests have taken hold and made the room ready:

Clear out the benches and stools; Set in the middle The trestles, then fiddle; We'll dance till we're tired, merry fools. Throw open the windows for air, That the breeze Softly please The throat of each child debonair. When the leaders grow weary to sing, We'll all say, "Fiddler, play Us the tune for a stylish court-fling."

(They apparently piled the table-frames in the middle of the room in place of the linden, about which they danced on the lawn.)

The singer goes on to remind them of the preparation for the party:

"I advise my friends to consult where the children shall have their fun. Megenwart has a large room: if it like you all, we will have the holiday party there. His daughter wishes us to come. All of you tell the rest. Engelmar shall lead a dance around the table."

Again: "Let Kunegunde know; we shall be blamed if no one tells her about it, and don't forget Hedwig." Once more: "Come along, children, to the farm-house at Hademuot's; Engelbrecht, Adelmar, Friderich, Tuoze, Guote, Wentel, and her sisters all three; Hildeburg, pretty child; Jiutel and her cousin Ermelint."

Still again, in one of the cheerful early songs, before Neidhart's bitter tone came in:

"Now for the children who've been asked to the party. Jiutel shall tell them all, that they are to step after the fiddle with Hilde. 'Twill be a great dance. Diemuot, Gisel, are going together; Wendel, too, Engelmuot, for Heaven's sake! go out and call Künze to come.

"Tell her the man is here; if she cares to see him, as she has all the time been wishing to, let her put on a little jacket and her cloak; I should prefer to have her come here, than to have him find her there at home in her every day clothes.

"Künze tarried then no longer, but came, as Engelmuot bade her. She was in a hurry; quickly she dressed. Both sides of her gown were red silk. The finest of girls! No one could discover through the country, one I should be so glad to give my dear mother for a daughter.

"Haha! How she pleased me, when I saw what she was; such hair, and red lips. Then I asked her to sit by me, but she said: 'I don't dare; I've been told not to talk with you, or even sit by you. Go and ask Heilke over there by Vriderune!'"

"I hear dancing in the room," he sings at another time; "a crowd of village women are there; two fiddles; when they pause, gay outbreak of talking and laughing. Through the window goes the hubbub. Adelber never dances but between two girls." Sometimes the knightly guest entered into the gay interlude of conversation, entertaining a merry screaming group. But when his moody vein, or vexation at some common man's successful rivalry, dulled his social spirits, he would stand apart, or go to one side with one of the peasant maids, and satirically note the men scattered over the room. The young farmer's assumption of the dress and manners of gentility, carrying arms, discarding rustic fashions, affecting polite speech ("_Mit sîner rede er vlaemet_," Neidhart says of one of them,--he talks like a fine gentleman from abroad),--all this was ridiculous to the courtly poet, and his sense of the humor of it was associated with the bitterness of social contempt. "Look at Engelmar, how high he holds his head. What elegant style he has, at the dance, with his showy sword; something different from his father Batze. His son is a poor gawk, with his rough head. He puffs himself out like a stuffed pigeon, that sits crop-full on a corn-chest." And again: "Did you ever see so gay a peasant as he is? Good Lord! he is first of all in the dance. His sword-band is two hands broad. Proud enough he, of his new jacket; it has four and twenty small pieces of cloth in it, and the sleeves come down over his hand."[8] "There are two peasants wearing coats in the court style, of Austrian cloth. Uoze never cut them."

Then he goes on to say:

"Perhaps you would like to hear how the rustics are dressed. Their clothes are above their place. Small coats they wear, and small cloaks; red hoods, shoes with buckles, and black hose. They have on silk pouch-bags, and in them they carry pieces of ginger, to make themselves agreeable to the girls. They wear their hair long, a privilege of good birth. They put on gloves that come up to their elbows. One appears in a fustian jacket green as grass. Another flaunts it in red. Another carries a sword long as a hemp flail, wherever he goes; the knob of its hilt has a mirror, that he makes the girls look at themselves in. Poor clumsy louts, how can the girls endure them? One of them tears his partner's veil, another sticks his sword hilt through her gown, as they are dancing, and more than once, enthusiastically dancing and excited by the music, their awkward feet tread on the girls' skirts and even drag them off. But they are more than clumsy, they have an offensive horse-play kind of pleasantry that is nothing less than insult. They put their hands in wrong places, and one of them tries to get a maiden's ring, and actually wrenches it from her finger as she is treading the bending _reie_.

"Why should I not be angry at his insolence? Yet I would not mind the ring so much, if he had not hurt her hand."

And just so, Engelmar snatched her mirror from Neidhart's darling Vriderune.

This last, as has been said, is the most famous incident in the Neidhart story. From it he dates all his misfortunes, and he reverts to it, over and over, with bitterness that can hardly be regarded as merely ironical humor. Yet numerous as the references are, there is a mystery about the affair that has not been cleared up. It has been suggested that Vriderune's way of taking the rudeness made it clear to Neidhart that it was her peasant lover, and not himself, whom she really liked, but it would seem more natural to associate the occurrence with something violent. Possibly the poet's indignation at the boorish familiarity led him to a personal attack, just as in another connection he threatens to strike an obnoxious fellow, and the resulting quarrel may have been taken up by friends of both, with such serious consequences that various annoyances followed on their part, which he could only return by insulting hits in his songs. The chances are all in favor of the poet's having been a slighter man physically than these farm-workers, at one of whom he sneers for the sacks that ride on his neck, and there are suggestions in the pseudo-Neidhart poetry of his having had helpers to a revenge. In one of these imitations it is said that through Neidhart's injury thirty-two had their left legs cut off, an evident exaggeration of an earlier imitation, where the writer reminds his hearers of what happened to Engelmar for taking Vriderune's mirror, that he lost his left leg and had to go on crutches. Such violent fights are authentically reported at merrymakings of the time, and as the aristocratic leader of such a brawl, Neidhart no doubt would find his subsequent residence among the peasants uncongenial. Yet why should he manifest such reserve, at the same time that he mentions the subject so constantly, referring to it long after he has left Bavaria? Is it possible that his jealousy and hot blood drove him to some underhanded attack in some such way as that in which a brilliant restoration poet tried to punish a supposed injury? This ill reputation as an aristocrat equally insolent and treacherous, might follow him to Austria; he would hardly be pleased to acknowledge in his poem what he had done, while the constant references to his injury in the insult of Vriderune, and the misfortunes to himself which it caused may be regarded as half defensive attempts to excite sympathy instead of disapproval. So much for possible explanations of this curious literary enigma, out of which we may make too much; for, as I have already suggested, Neidhart may only be doing what novelists sometimes do when they repeat a popular hit in characterization. At any rate, Vriderune seems to have been lost to her upper-class lover, "and ever from that time I have had some new heart-sorrow."