Part 8

Neidhart constantly reverts to the peasants' brutality and eagerness to fight. "Look out for a brutish fellow named Ber. He is tall and broad-shouldered; he scarcely can get in at the door. Fie, who brought him here? He is the nephew of Hildebolt of Bern, who was pounded by Williher." Lanze, again, "had got himself up for a champion, and thought nothing could resist him. He put underneath a coat of mail. Snarling like a bear he goes; so ugly is he, one were a child who withstood him." And of another: "He wears a sword that cuts like shears, and a good safety hat. Whoever you are, you may well keep out of his way. Villagers, look out for him; his sword is poisoned. It's a well-tempered Waidover, that sword of his."

With such village-warriors, no wonder that the parties did not always end cheerfully. With a resemblance to modern slang Neidhart tells how they threaten to put sunshine through each other. The lively episode of a quarrel over a rural gallant's presenting a young lady with a piece of ginger, Neidhart says he cannot describe in full, for he came away. But "each began screaming to his friends; one called loudly: 'Help, gossip Wezerant.' He must have been in great difficulty to scream so for help. I heard Hildebolt's sister shriek: 'Oh, my brother, my brother!'" Another dance ends with a milder disagreement. "Ruoprecht found an egg--'I ween the devil gave it to him'--and threatened to throw it. Eppe got mad, and dared him. Ruoprecht threw it at the top of his head, and it trickled down over him." Sometimes, evidently, peacemakers interfered, as they did in Frideliep's and Engelmar's disagreement about Gotelint, so that the rivals did not fight, though "just like two silly geese they went toward each other, all the rest of the day."

Like all of those poets, Neidhart, though he says "I" very often, lets us become but indifferent acquaintances. We read some of the mediæval lyrists without feeling sure that we detect a single genuine personal note; they had little of our modern sense of individuality. With Neidhart we fare better than with most; yet, after all, we are hardly sure that some of his personal confessions are not formally or humorously assumed. Yet of one trait we are left in no doubt, his strong German sense for the fatherland. With many other Bavarians, he went to Syria and Damietta on the crusade of 1217-1219, led by Leopold VII. of Austria, and he has left us two songs which, though certainly different enough from the deep religious feeling of such crusade lyrics as Hartmann's or Walther's, are unmistakably sincere. The first opens with the minnesinger's usual spring and love-lorn stanzas, but Neidhart soon drops conventionality with the exclamation, "For my song the foreign folk here do not care: ah, blessings on thee, Germany!" It reminds us of Walther: nothing is like the German home. He thinks of sending a messenger, not we notice, to some town or castle, but to that village where he left the loving heart from which his constancy never wavers, and to the dear friends over-sea.

"Tell them from us all that they should quickly see us there, joyous enough, except for these wide waves. Bear my glad service to my mistress, dear to me before all ladies, and say to friends and kinsmen that I am well. If they inquire how things are going with us pilgrims, tell them, dear boy, what ill these foreign folk have wrought us. Haste thee, be swift; after thee assuredly shall I follow, quick as ever I may. God grant we may live to see the happy day of going home."

"We are all scarcely alive," he goes on; "the army is more than half dead. Ah, were I there! By my beloved gladly would I rest, in mine own place." "If I may only grow old with her!" he cries, and he breaks out impatiently against those who keep delaying through August, instead of moving westward. "Nowhere could a man be better off than at home, in his own parish."

At last the expedition, dissatisfied and worn, as the returning crusaders always were, are on the confines of the longed-for country. We can imagine the straggling company making their way along, their minstrel riding among them, fingering the old violin that he has carried over his shoulders all the two years, and thinking out a new song. He is still a young man, or at least only approaching middle age, and thoughts of home, friendship, love, and the spring gaiety of the village life, crowd upon him with buoyant thrills; he strikes the strings more firmly, and his voice rings out a home-coming lyric, full of life and feeling. "The long bright days are come again, and with them the birds; it is a long time since they sang so well. The winter-weary are gayer than they have been for thirty years. Maidens, ye children, fine people all, let your hearts be free to the summer joy, spring quickly in the carols."

Dear herald, homeward go; 'Tis over, all my woe; We're near the Rhine!

Neidhart's poems are readily classified in two divisions, his songs for summer and for winter. Both were probably sung as an accompaniment to the dances, either of the peasants or of the upper class, though there may be some doubt whether this is true of all the winter songs. Almost invariably he opens with a nature-prelude, often an elaborate one, and the temper of the songs is always congenial to the season, gay for summer, and gloomy or critical for winter.

There is no evidence that the difficulty with Engelmar was the occasion of the poet's leaving Bavaria, but his unpopularity with the peasants seems to have had something to do with the loss of his fief. He was cast down at the thought of parting with Reuenthal, and said that he would sing no longer, since the name under which his merry lines had been known was taken from him; and with a play on the word, "I am put out undeservedly, my friends; now leave me free of the name!" But after he was settled by Frederich on an Austrian fief, he adapted himself cheerfully to his new home. "Here I am at Medelicke, in spite of them all. I am not sorry that I sang so much of Eppe and of Gumpe at Reuenthal."

The Duke gave him money and a house, in response to musical solicitations, and Neidhart appealed for exemption from his heavy taxes, that threatened to consume what his children needed. With our modern ideas this system of literary patronage upon which mediæval poets depended, and which usually required direct and even pressing solicitation, seems painful to self-respect; we forget how lately it flourished. In those days when princely giving was an established custom, and differed from a system of salaries mainly in being a less regularly appointed income, a poet's request for a gift was scarcely more than a modern author's reminder of an unpaid claim; there is nothing of the unmanly dependence of Coleridge in these earlier suppliants for aid. None of them asked more gracefully--even Chaucer is not more delicately suggestive--than Neidhart in such lines as these:

"Whoever had a bird who satisfied him with song through the year, he would occasionally look to his bird-cage, and give him good food. Then the bird could go on singing sweet melodies. If he always sang well to meet the May, he should be well cared for, summer and winter. Even the birds appreciate kind treatment."

But the times were bad, and even a box of silver, and a house to put it in, and remission of taxes, could not keep the poet gay as he passed into later life. He composed penitential lyrics, after orthodox precedents, of the love-singers, for they almost always grew old seriously. On these we need not linger, though there seems a cry fuller than the echo-note in his farewell to Lady Earth, and appeal for pardon for some of his foolish songs: "Lord God of Heaven, give me thy guidance; Might of all Might, now strengthen my heart, that I may win soul's health, and partake ever-enduring joy, through thy sweet will." But the wail of all of the thirteenth-century's serious minds, that things were going "ever the lenger the wers" in Christendom, comes out nowhere more deeply than in Neidhart's allegorical love-song to Joy of the World, chiding her for her change of character during his long, unrequited service:

"False, shameless folk nowadays people her court, and her old household, truth, chastity, good manners, none find these any longer. My lady's honor is lame all over. She is fallen so that none can rescue her. She lies in such a pool that only God can make her clean. Men of wise mind be on your guard before her, in church or on street: women of worth keep far away."

Eighty new melodies he has sung in her service; this is the last, and not the most joyous.

To this closing period we may refer a few summer songs that are an exception to the usually light-hearted verses of that form. Their seriousness is all the more noticeable from their fair-weather setting; for once, the spring is not a panacea. "A delightful May has come, but alas, neither priest nor layman rejoices in its arrival. Were it the Emperor who had come, we might rejoice. Trouble and sorrow dwell in Austria." There is something here besides a sense that the joyousness of simple free-living and the loyalty of love-service are passing away; he attributes much of the social decline to national confusion and the political unrestraint. Yet controversial as he is in social relations, he has little of Walther von der Vogelweide's thoughtfulness and energy in patriotic polemics. He drifts down the stream with a sigh.

In the poem which Meyer's elaborate study of the order of his work places last, though only conjecturally, he again considers his friends' entreaty for more songs. The world goes too sadly, he says; as he had said before that they must ask Troestelin to sing; he himself had no longer a heart for poetry. Yet there is one pleasant story that he can tell them: "to break down troubles comes one worthy to be praised; 'tis May, with all his might." There is something pathetic in such songs, that try to assume the cheerful strain in which the poet, now grown gloomy, wrote while he was young. They remind us of the stray leaves that we sometimes see caught up to their old home among the branches by a sudden March gust; the brown leaves that will never again uncrumple their green infancies, hover for a moment, then sink hesitatingly back to the ground. In this one song, the nature stanzas are transferred from the place of prelude to the conclusion. "May has conquered; wood and heath have adorned themselves with their lovely attire; blue flowers are here and the roses," and he ends with the old thought, that joyousness and virtuous honor go together. As an idle fancy it is "pleasant if one consider it," to regard these as the final words of this knightly singer of mediæval country scenes, the last of the great figures of that old German group, a parting reminder of the philosophy of a happy life which mediæval lyrists often maintained so earnestly,--that the secret of good living is blitheness of heart, and out-of-door life in spring and summer. For many of these old poets the two terms were convertible; their creed was surely a simple one.

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTE:

[8] We must remember that the unwillingness of the upper grade of society to have peasants assume its styles of dress, went so far that ducal edicts were issued forbidding them to use coats of mail and helmets, or to carry any weapons. Bitter complaints were made of their wearing any stuffs so fine as silk, and clothes stylishly cut.

[Decoration]

MEIER HELMBRECHT,

A GERMAN FARMER OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.

The usual conception of the middle ages seems to consist of a few facts and theories about the feudal system and the crusades, the names with possibly some traits of a few eminent public figures and a general impression of confusion and obscurity. Supplementing this central idea, one usually sees a panel picture on either side. One, sunshine flashing from the spears and armor of knights tilting in tournaments, and watched by dimly beautiful women; in the distance a solitary knight pricking over a plain, or, guided by the wail of an unseen and lovely captive, making his way through forest haunts of giants and gnomes. The other, a lowering twilight overhanging gloomy monastery walls, the shelter of melancholy, hypocrisy, manuscript illuminations, and a barren, difficult philosophy. Sunshine and twilight on either hand, and in the background an impenetrable mist concealing the great masses of humanity, as well as all concrete actual lives even of the great. A little information and a little romance are unsatisfactory artists for a sketch of mediævalism. We soon discover that there is a great deal behind such a picture of soldiers living in wars, and in the tourneying pretence of war; or schoolmen contending in brilliant logical panoply within and without spectral philosophic fastnesses; or hermits, nuns, and monks fighting against God's present that they might win His future; or marauders beating down helplessness and innocence.

Yet we may study the middle ages laboriously, and find ourselves still confronted by the mist that hangs over the rank and file. Our curiosity about these forgotten multitudes teases us. "How is it that you lived, and what is it that you did?" we ask these distant prototypes of Wordsworth's peasant. We come to discover that there is much behind our slight old notion of chivalry and monasticism; though seven hundred years have changed its conditions, life then and now is yet less different than we had thought. But we find it difficult to acquire much information about those social substrata on which the learned and the polite classes rested. Clio is the most aristocratic of the ladies nine, and that instinct of vitality whereby we count fame for ourselves something desirable, makes us think with a certain compassion of great armies of those generations filing sullenly on, not only as individuals, but as whole masses, to the grave of oblivion. The little that we know makes us sure only that they were wretched, their lives the most gloomy of all the lives of gloomy ages.

We may read thousands of pages of the literature of those days with scarcely any addition to our knowledge of the work-a-day world, for most of the poetry is romantic, and in its imitative phases mainly a reflection of courtly customs and character. The middle ages in Germany and France were anything but uncivilized, and the poetry of secondary cultivation is, as was said in the last essay, likely to prefer idealistic interpretation of its finest development to democratic realism. Yet the student finds from time to time interesting material for an account of the average life, and in the poet whom this essay is designed to introduce to a modern audience, we obtain an extended study in this side field of literary interpretation. He wrote not of high life but of the middle classes, not in romance but in a literal yet at the same time artistic manner that we may call a heightened realism. He appears to have been himself one of the people, a poet who possibly made his living by reciting poems of incident, and by singing at their merrymakings, though of this there is no evidence. It has been thought by some German scholars that he may have been a monk, but the indications make rather against than for this view. We know in fact nothing whatever about him except for one single line, in which he tells us that his name is Wernher the Gardener.

As was said, his poem is remarkable as being the heightened treatment of a plain story of the peasant classes a little before 1250; it is remarkable, too, for the liveliness and simple force of his treatment. He is an artist--though he works in chalks instead of water-colors;--unornamented, unassuming, he produces an impression of personal power, moral seriousness, a clear eye for what he saw, and the power to state it directly, one of the marks of a later and more developed age. He has no little dramatic liveliness, a sense of humor, and the pleasantest love for the plain beauties of character and home-life.

He tells the story of a farmer, Helmbrecht, and his wayward son. The boy has been the admiration of his peasant family as the oldest child, notable for his splendid yellow hair, and full of life and spirit. At the time the poem opens he has grown to early manhood, dissatisfied with the hidden and laborious life of tiller of the soil, vain of his appearance, fond of fine dress, and ambitious to live easily and be admired. He is petted and indulged by his mother and his sister Gotelint, and when he desires a hood--a part of masculine costume much affected by gallant youths--they provide him with one so fine that it becomes famous far and near. Embroidery, as every one knows who is acquainted with the mediæval arts, was the most artistic accomplishment of the period. Ladies learned to embroider and weave the most complicated and elaborate devices; handicraftsmen of all sorts put on their work representations so copious that one sometimes wonders whether the literary descriptions of them are not exaggerations. Can the frequency and detail of these passages, we wonder, be a faintly remembered tradition of the devices put by Homer on the shield of Achilles, or by Vergil on the gates of the rising Carthage? At any rate, tapestries, cloths, and garments, to say nothing of saddles and the like, were covered by picture after picture, in almost every important poem of the age. This young peasant Helmbrecht's hood was embroidered, not, of course, by the rude country fingers of his mother and sister, but by a clever nun, who had run away from her nunnery to enjoy the pleasures of a lively youth. Many were the wages of farm-produce by which she was persuaded to fit out the young man. The hood was covered with birds, parrots, and doves; on one side were representations of the siege of Troy and the escape of Æneas; on the other, the stout deeds of Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver, in their wars against the heathen Moors. Behind, adventures of old German legendary heroes, in the cycle of Dietrich of Bern. In front, dances of knights, ladies, and of maidens and young esquires--the favorite and mediæval dance, where the gentleman stood between two ladies, holding the hand of each.

After this acquisition the boy became ambitious for still more finery, and was indulged in an elaborate costume that need not be described. Such white linen, such a splendid blue coat, all covered with buttons, gilded ones in double rows down the back, around the collar, and in front of silver. About the shoulders little bells were hung, that rang merrily when he sprang in the _reie_. Ah, very love-lorn were the glances cast on him by women and girls at the dance.

At last he is fully equipped by the love and sacrifice of his family, and they are happy in his elegance, and contented with themselves because the self-willed and capricious boy is pleased; when suddenly the simple household is thrown into grief and anxiety by his announcement that he is going to leave home. He must have a horse--there was none on the farm--to complete his outfit as a gentleman, and then he will ride away to some court and seek his fortune. In vain they remonstrate.

"'My dear father, help me on. My mother and sister have helped me so that I shall love them all my life.'

"His father was troubled to hear that he was resolved to go, but he said to him: 'I'll give you a fast horse for your outfit, good at hedges and ditches, for you to have there at court. I'll buy him for you willingly, if I can find one for sale. But, my dear son, now give up going to court. The ways there are hard for those who have not been used to them from the time they were children. My dear son, now drive team for me, or if you'd rather, hold the plough, and I'll drive for you, and let us till the farm, so you'll come to your grave full of honors like me; at least I hope to, for I surely am honest and loyal, and every year I pay my tithes. I have lived my life without hate and without envy.'

"But the son replied: 'My dear father, keep quiet and stop talking; there's only one way about it, I'm going to find out how things smack there at court. Your sacks sha'n't load my back any longer. I won't load any more manure on your wagon, and God hate me if I ever yoke oxen for you again, and sow your oats. That's not the thing for my long yellow hair and my curly locks, and my close-fitting coat, and my fine hood, and the silk doves the women worked on it. I won't help you farm any longer.'

"'Dear son, stay with me. I am certain that farmer Ruoprecht will give you his daughter, with lots of sheep and swine, and ten cattle, old and young. At court you'll be hungry, you'll have to lie hard, and give up all comforts. Now take my advice, and it will be to your interests and credit. It very seldom happens that a man gets along well who rebels against his own station. Your station is the plough. My son, I swear to you that the genuine court-people will make fun of you, my dear child. Do as I say, and give it up.'

"'Father, if I only have a horse I shall get on as well in the court ways as those who were born there. Any one who saw that hood on my head would swear a thousand oaths that I never worked for you, or drove a plough through a furrow. Whenever I put on the clothes my mother and my sister gave me yesterday, I sha'n't look much as if I ever took a flail to thresh wheat on the barn floor, or as if I ever drove stakes. When I get my legs and my feet in the hose and cordovan boots, nobody'll know that I ever made fence for you or any one else. Let me have a horse, and farmer Ruoprecht may go without me for a son-in-law. I'll not give up my future for a wife.'"

The father goes on pleading with the boy to take advice and keep out of the disorderly life he is likely to get into about a court. By the silent assumption that his new master and his people will pillage from the peasantry, we get a suggestion of the lawlessness of the country--which had grown worse during the long absenteeism of Frederic II. But if the peasants catch you, he tells his son with energy, you will fare much worse than one of the gentlemen would. They will take the quickest revenge, and think that they are doing God service when they find one of their own kind stealing.

But the son only goes on to repeat that he will leave the farm. He talks just as an ambitious country fellow will talk to-day about the slow life and small profits. He becomes bolder and more insolent. If it were not for that wretched horse he would be riding with the rest across fields and dragging peasants through the hedges; the cattle would be lowing as he drove them off. He says he can endure poverty no longer;--raising a colt or an ox for three years, and then selling them for just nothing. So his father traded a large piece of homespun, four good cows, two oxen, three steers, and four bushels of wheat,--all worth about ten pounds,--for a horse that could not have been sold for three ("alas for the wasted seven!"), and the young man put on his finery, tossed his head, and, looking around, jauntily declared that he could "bite through a stone, or eat iron, he felt so fierce." If he could catch the Emperor or the Duke, there would be some money coming in. "'Father, you could manage a Saxon easier than me.'"

When he calls upon his father to release him from the family control, the latter assents, though with all his old reluctance. Indeed he cannot let him go without one more appeal: