Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature Part 2

Nicolette was lying one night in her bed, and she saw the moon clearly s.h.i.+ning through a window, and she heard the nightingale singing in the garden and she thought of Auca.s.sin her lover, whom she loved so much."

So making a rope of the bedclothes she lets herself down into the garden.

"Then she caught her gown by one hand in front and by the other behind, and tucked it up on account of the dew which she saw was heavy on the gra.s.s, and she went down through the garden.... And the daisy-blossoms that she broke with the toes of her feet, that lay over on the small of her foot, were even black, by her feet and legs, so very white was the dear little girl. Along the streets she pa.s.sed in the shadow, for the moon shone very clear, and she went on till she came to the tower where her lover was."

And again when the lover is in pursuit of her, after she had built herself a lodge in what she thought a safe retreat; he does not know where she is, and his thoughts are so absorbed that he falls and puts out his shoulder, and then creeps into her vacant shelter:

"And he looked through a break in the lodge and saw the stars in the sky, and he saw one brighter than the rest, and he began to say:

'Pretty little star, I see Where the moon is leading thee.

Nicolette is with thee there, My darling with the golden hair; G.o.d would have her, I believe, To make beautiful the eve.'"

Yet even here there is nothing of the deeper sensibility to midnight sky, common alike to ancient and modern seriousness. Yet we find notes also of this. It is hard, for example, to think of giving up the genuineness of Dante's letter refusing to return to Florence, if only for the rare touch of everywhere seeing the sun and the stars (_nonne solis astrorumque specula ubique conspiciam?_), that bears out such evidences as the last word of each of the divine canticles and other fine proofs that he felt the high wonder and peace of the stars at night. Who can doubt that he did--that every deep nature always has? Yet the poetical evidence for it is curiously scanty throughout these centuries. It is a surprise to come upon such an exclamation as this of Freidank's: "The constellations sweep through heaven as if they were alive,--sun, moon, the bright stars,--there is nothing so wonderful!"

Indeed, I can recall no writer to whom the material world seems to suggest such inner sensations as he who called himself Freidank, the German free-thinker. He was not much of a poet, so far as his verses go, but his soul knew life as mystery. He also made one of the band of reformers three centuries before Luther. He saw the corruption of the Church, yet he revered the sacred inst.i.tution; in spite of his faith, he was a Christian rationalist. Some of his sentences almost startle us, as words before their season: "If the Pope can forgive sins by indulgence, without repentance, people ought to stone him if he allows any one to go to h.e.l.l." "G.o.d is constantly shaping new souls, which he gives to men--to be lost. How does the soul deserve G.o.d's wrath before it is born?" He is haunted by the secret of life: "How is the soul made? No one tells me that. If all souls could be in a hand, none could see or grasp their glory." "Earth and heaven are full of the G.o.dhead. h.e.l.l would be empty, were G.o.d not there." "Whatever the sun touches, the sunlight keeps pure. However the priest may be, the ma.s.s is still pure.

The ma.s.s and the suns.h.i.+ne will always be pure." "I never cease wondering how the soul is made. Whence it came, and whither it fares--the path is hidden. Nay, I know not who I am myself.[4] Lord G.o.d, grant me that I may know thee, and also myself." So when Freidank hears the roar of the wind, its invisible might reminds his skepticism that the soul may well be great, though none can see it: while he watches the wide mist which no hand can seize upon, a symbolism of the soul comes to him again. He is oppressed by the restless energy of being: "Our hearts beat unceasingly, our breaths are seldom still:--and then, our thoughts and dreams!" As he rides through spring, he observes the infinite diversity of nature:

Many hundred flowers, Alike none ever grew; Mark it well, no leaf of green Is just another's hue.

"Many a man looks out at the stars, and tells what wonders take place there. Let him tell me now (something closer at hand), what is the weed in the garden. If he tells me that truly, I shall be more ready to believe the other." It is the germ of Tennyson's _Flower in the Crannied Wall_. Nature's commonplaces hold the heavenly mystery in a common bond with their own. Such subtle blendings of the outward and inward vision could come only from a refined and pensive spirit--such as his who sums up thus the discipline of life: "Many a time the lips must smile when the heart weeps."

One of the marked deficiencies of all these descriptions of nature is in the indefiniteness of the terms employed. In minute accuracy, Dante, to be sure, is one of the world's greatest masters; but elsewhere it is rarely that we come upon anything concrete or specific. It is not until centuries later, indeed, that, so far as nature goes, we find habitual composition "with the eye upon the object," but, as it seems, most mediaeval poets never carried their observation beyond the barest general impressions. We do not expect Tennyson's "More black than ashbuds in the front of March," or Browning's eye for the fact that when "the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly," the red is about to turn gray. The outer world's "open secret" is not open enough to make us demand minute attention. But it is surprising that they did not more frequently record easy impressions, and in their inventions introduce definite details.

The poetical effect of even apparently prosaic precision is at times imaginative, but the art of this was kept for the later romanticists.

There is a lyric, however (belonging, I believe, to the twelfth century), by a poet of northern France, and written as a satire on the love-romance literature of the age, which contains one or two happy instances of just this missing trait. So charming it is in itself that I have translated it as a whole, though it belongs to an essay on the lyrical romances, instead of on nature. What a light touch the unknown writer shows, what dainty fancy! Sir Thopas is hardly a parallel to this blending of poetry with humor, a humor too gracious to be derisive, whose genial satire sparkles and dances to meet its sister wave of sentiment and beauty, till they ripple together, and each seems to have absorbed the other. The opening stanza is the poet's introduction of himself, and from the olive we may draw an inference respecting his local a.s.sociations:

Will ye attend me, while I sing A song of love,--a pretty thing, Not made on farms:-- Nay, by a gentle knight 'twas made Who lay beneath an olive's shade In his love's arms.

1.

A linen undergown she wore, And a white ermine mantle, o'er A silken coat; With flowers of May to keep her feet, And round her ankles leggings neat, From lands remote.

2.

Her girdle was of leaf.a.ge green; Spring foliage, with a fringing sheen Of gold above; And underneath a love-purse hung, By bloomy pendants featly strung, A gift of love.

3.

Upon a mule the lady rode, The which with silver shoes was shode; Saddle gold-red; And behind rose-bushes three She had set up a canopy To s.h.i.+eld her head.

4.

As so she pa.s.sed adown the meads, A gentle childe in knightly weeds Cried: "Fair one, wait!

What region is thy heritance?"

And she replied: "I am of France, Of high estate.

5.

"My father is the nightingale, Who high within the bosky pale, On branches sings; My mother's the canary; she Sings on the high banks where the sea Its salt spray flings."

6.

"Fair lady, excellent thy birth; Thou comest from the chief of earth, Of high estate: Ah, G.o.d our Father, that to me Thou hadst been given, fair ladye, My wedded mate!"

Everything here is definite and concrete, and how delightful the picture all is. Such plastic art as the "rose-bushes three" is not unworthy of the great modern poets of whom its magic and romantic definiteness reminds us,--as the "five miles meandering of Alph, the sacred river,"

or the "kisses four" with which the pale loiterer shut the eyes of La Belle Dame sans Merci. The description of the nightingale on its high branches, too, is a noticeably accurate touch, as we compare it, for example, with Coleridge's nightingale descriptions.

The explanation for the usual vague and indefinite description is not found in saying that they could not describe minutely. We meet with abundant details of such material interests as embroideries or armor.

There is artistic emotion in Villehardouin's account of the glorious sight of Constantinople, as it rose before the crusaders, just as distinctly as in Lord Byron's letter. But, to their simple eyes, nature not only failed to suggest a.s.sociated fancies, like Shakespeare's

"Wrinkled pebbles in the brook,"

or Wordsworth's ash,

"A soft eye-music of slow waving boughs,"

but they see natural objects as units, without lingering upon their parts. When we find, for example, a line that marks the jerky flight of a swallow, we are surprised at the specific touch; we look almost in vain for such landscape details as the colors of autumn. Neidhart von Reuenthal is marking his originality, when he speaks of the red tree-tops, falling down yellow.

The want of observation and the shallow sympathy with nature shown by most poets before Dante are much more surprising than their preference for placid effects. It is unusual, for instance, to meet such a suggestive note of a.s.sociation as in the stanza by the Frenchman Gaces Brulles:

The birds of my own land In Brittany I hear, And seem to understand The distant in the near; In sweet Champagne I stand, No longer here.

This paraphrase, indeed, is unworthy of the charming simplicity of the original. Surely, when Matthew Arnold made his sweeping characterization of mediaeval poetry as grotesque, he forgot what a straightforward evolution of narrative or of quiet sentiment, and what a transparent expression, we find in some of these minor poets. They are as direct and unadorned, as they are graceful. It is almost impossible to translate them without subst.i.tuting for the fresh and delicate touch, some metaphysical warping of the idea, or some rhetorical consciousness in words. What for instance could be more elegantly remote from the grotesque than this literal translation of Brulles' expression of his sensibility to the song-birds of his home: "The birds of my country I have heard in Brittany; by their song I know well that in sweet Champagne I heard them of old."

We may sum up these outline statements to this effect.

The northern poets described storm, winter, the ocean, and kindred subjects, with considerable force and fulness. In the cultivated literatures to the south, natural description was mainly confined to the agreeable forms of beauty; the grand, awesome, and inspiring were scarcely felt, and the literal fact of their physical expression was hardly ever noticed. The exterior world was not made a subject of close observation, nor was its poetic availability realized as a setting for action, or as an interpreter of emotion.

The people of the north, through being habituated to severer weather, not merely as a fact of climate, but from their rougher, less politely organized habits of living, [we should especially observe their activity on the sea,] regarded the violent seasons and aspects of nature with the sympathetic acquiescence of custom. Moreover, this influence tended to develop st.u.r.dier and more rugged character, race-temperament obviously being in part a geographical result, which acts with the forces of social organization, especially those that affect the moral qualities, such as rude or luxurious living. This vigorous character was more susceptible to impressions of native power, as well as from a.s.sociation more interested in recalling them. Accordingly, we find the early northern poetry an antic.i.p.ation of the seriousness of modern English literature, and, as well, of its unequalled recognition of physical symbolisms of the sublime. Where the northern force blended with more southern lightness and elegance, as it did in the _Mabinogion_, we find a deeper poetic sentiment; where it coincides with moral earnestness, we find such nature sensation as in the poetry of _Sir Gawayn_. But the literature of the Germans and their romance originals, aim at courtly levities; they artificialize sentiment and thought, as well as manner.

The deeper and more spiritually sympathetic minds did not as a rule devote themselves to _belles-lettres_. The Church drew them into her sober service, and even though they wrote, the close theological faith was not favorable to their poetic expansion. Most of all, there was but little individualism, and any artistic sensation of our modern complex inner consciousness was still crude, even when it existed at all.

One point, however, should be observed in any inquiry into the reasons for the inadequateness of these ages' feeling for nature; that many latent sympathies may never have found a voice. Many through the centuries before our later ease of publication, may have felt the modern sensations, without ever thinking of putting them into words. In any new movement, of art as of practice, a great leader of expression is needed.

Men are sheep to their leaders in various admirations, and many genuine aesthetic tastes are acquired, through stages of more or less unconscious imitation. Browning puts this in an acute sentence where Fra Lippo Lippi explains his usefulness as a painter:

". . . We're made so that we love, First when we see them painted, things we have pa.s.sed Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see."

There were few new departures, there was little originality, in the methods of mediaeval literature. Descriptions of the physical world as a field of power and sublimity would have fallen dead on the ears of a public who had never dreamed that storm and cliffs were beautiful. What if Wordsworth had tried to support himself and win fame by singing at castles? Nor is it easy, though the taste has been established, to describe a sunset, or the sublimity of the Alps. We say to each other "How beautiful!" "How grand!" seldom more. Rare imagination and the tact of genius are necessary to tell what we really need to show. The sense of physical sublimity is complex. Its distinctive element is moral or spiritual emotion. For a full delineation it requires a more subtle, verbal repertory than those popular poets usually possessed. Yet these modifications no longer apply when we come to Dante, and superior as his interpretations are to his predecessors' we miss even in him, as we miss in the great poets for four hundred years afterwards, appreciation of the material world's sublimity.

Macaulay and others have said that it was not until man had become the master of nature that he learned to love its stern and violent aspects.

But thunder storms, for example, are as dangerous now as they ever were, at least to a traveller. Still, Byron wrote of them with raptures amid the Pindus mountains as his predecessors did not.

Winter was scarcely colder or bleaker for mediaeval poets than for Scottish peasants a century ago, yet Burns would sing as they could not:

"E'en winter bleak has charms for me, When winds rave through the naked tree."

Others have accounted for this change by the era of science, with its close scrutiny of the world, and its enthusiasm for physical knowledge.

But the scientist masters the world as a reality where the poet sees it as a symbol. The two modern tendencies may be the result of a common cause--that recognition of complexity, and disposition to observe, which is a main fact in man's expansion.