Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature Part 6

Customs related in Herrick's _Going a-Maying_, such as the decoration of the houses of favorites with early greenery and the processions of girls and young men to the woods and fields, were familiar in Germany long before. Exercises to welcome spring became not only a social but even--so far as the rude country songs went--a literary habit. The earlier ritual dance around some altar or symbol of the summer deity grew into an entertainment from which all sense of its original significance had pa.s.sed away. These celebrations became the main social feature of the warm months. At one time partners appear to have been taken for the year (a pa.s.sage in _Wilhelm Meister_ reminds us of this usage), but not in the period before us. A summons to a holiday dance (and the large number of church festivals made holidays frequent) was usually given by a musician playing or singing through the street. The young men and women, and not infrequently their elders, came to the customary field, dressed for the gaiety; as they went along, tossing and catching bright-colored b.a.l.l.s. This favorite ball-playing, mentioned by more than one poet of the age as a sign of spring, and especially entered into by girls, often formed a prelude to the dance. For one thing it gave the girls a way of choosing their partners, for the man who caught the ball tossed by a girl, according to some usages, could claim the right to dance with her. An anonymous poet of the thirteenth century gives a lively picture of one of these scenes.

"All the time the young people are pa.s.sing ball on the street. This is the earliest sport of summer, and as they play they scream. What if the rustic lad gives me a shove?

How rude he is as he darts here and there, flying and chasing and playing tricks with the ball. Then two by two they have a hoppaldy dance about the fiddle, as if they wanted to fly."

As one of the fellows holds the ball,

"What pretty speeches the girls make him, how they shriek, how wild they get. While he's hesitating to whom he'll throw, they stretch out their hands; now you're my friend (geveterlin),--throw it down here to me ... Jiutelin and Elsemuot hurry after it. Whoever gets it is the best one.

Krumpolt ran, and cried, 'Throw it to me, and I'll throw it back.' In the scrimmage some of the girls get pushed down, and an accident happens to Eppe, the prettiest one in the field. But she picks herself up, and tosses the ball into the air. All scream, 'Catch it! catch it!' No girl can play better than she does; she judges the ball so well, and is such a sure catch."

Another way of choosing partners was by presenting garlands, and one of the prettiest of the spring customs was the walk to the fields and woods after flowers for wreaths, either to give away or to wear. So one of the Latin songs describes young people going out,--

"Juvenes ut flores accipiant Et se per odores reficiant Virgines a.s.sumant alacriter, Et eant in prata floribus ornata, communiter."

It certainly is a genial phase of those old times, this out-of-door companions.h.i.+p of lads and la.s.sies, gathering flowers and "dancing in the chequered shade." The custom has in a manner survived to our own day; in England, for example, Mr. Thomas Hardy has introduced such scenes very pleasantly in some of his novels, but the zest and universality of it have not descended. Even in Elizabeth's England the hobby-horse was forgot; and back in the thirteenth century the May-time amus.e.m.e.nts were being frowned away. For preachers and moralists saw much evil in these summer gaieties. It is the old story: Nature is such a puritanical stage-manager that she likes to bring on a tragedy for the after-piece to her pleasant comedy, and she is best satisfied when we take warning from the practice and stay away from the play.

The insane frenzies into which meadow dancing was carried on some occasions, especially at the riotous midsummer festival, do not belong to our subject. Neidhart a.s.sumes a flippant tone about matters of conduct, but his treatment of the summer merrymakings is usually innocent and agreeable. He comes as an artist, to the rude material provided in the traditional village songs for these occasions, and transfers to the polished verse of Germany's already highly trained lyrical school, that fresh and gay subject-matter that is so remote from the formal phrases of most of his courtly predecessors. His songs are lyric in their introduction, but almost invariably epic or dramatic in the later stanzas, scarcely ever overstepping closely drawn lines.

Whereas, Walther von der Vogelweide's work in the popular poetry retains the lyrical mood throughout, and is far less realistic, never, I believe, treating a peasant element as such. Those lyrical preludes attest Neidhart's deep sentiment for nature; we feel that, in spite of the conventionality in them. He has the rare merit of an occasional specific note, and he touches even the hackneyed expressions about birds and flowers with a contagious buoyancy. Look at a few of these introductions:

"Hedges green as gold; the heath dressed in bright roses.

Come on, you fine girls: May is in the land. The linden is well hung with rich attire; now hearken, how the nightingale draws near."

"The time is here: for many a year I have not seen a fairer.

The cold winter is over, and many hearts rejoice that felt its chill. The woods are in leaf. Come then with me to the linden, dear."

"Summer, a thousand welcomes! Whatever heart was wounded by the long winter is healed, its pain all gone. Thou comest welcome to the world in all lands. Through thee, rich and poor lose their sorrows, when winter has to go."

And another, which loses its effect if we neglect the long, swinging metre:

The forest for new foliage its grey dress has forsaken; And therefore now full many hearts to pleasure must awaken.

The birds to whom the winter brought dismay, Have never sung so well as now the praises of the May.

The winter from the lovely heath at last has turned aside, And there the blossoms stand, arrayed in colors gaily pied.

Above them May's sweet dews are lightly shed; Ah, how I wish I had a wreath, dear friend, a lady said.

This stanza moves more quickly:

Forth from your houses, children fair!

Out to the street! No wind is there, Sharp wind, cold snow.

The birds were dreary, They're singing cheerily; Forth to the woodland go.

After such opening stanzas comes the action of the song, almost always an expression of a girl's longing to go to the dance, and her mother's unwillingness. The burden of the remonstrances is that of the song in _Much Ado_, "Men were deceivers ever"; and though some of the conversations are amiable, often the two come to high words, and even to blows. The girl cannot think of going without her best costume, and this, in the prudent old domestic management, was always carefully folded up, and kept under lock and key. "Who gave you the right to lock up my gown?" a daughter demands. "You did not spin a thread of it.

Where's the key? now open the room for me." Finally, she obtained it by stealth. "She took from the chest the gown that was laid in many small folds. To the knight of Reuenthal she threw her colored ball." But Neidhart grimly brings in her mother at the close.

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 gra.s.shopper, 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 a.s.sures 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 a.s.sured, 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 ma.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 t.i.ttering 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 cla.s.s 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 mediaeval poets were more than careless rhymsters: painstaking labor was a.s.sumed 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), ill.u.s.trates the statement that time was thought necessary for composition. The Provencal 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 inst.i.tuted and consummated. He put in the place of lyrical elegies, lyrical s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 a.s.sumptions 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 coa.r.s.e 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 fict.i.tious experiences and sensations. As I have remarked in an earlier essay, Cowley's love-poems had many mediaeval prototypes, and there seems no necessity for a.s.suming 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 a.s.sert the possibility that the continual reappearances of Engelmar, Neidhart's most recurrent character, who is always a.s.sociated with the beginning of his disasters, is due quite as much to the fact that his early treatment of the famous s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 subst.i.tuting irony and cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sion 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-cla.s.s rivals; but his role is more a Lothario's than a true la.s.s-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 gra.s.s 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."