Euphorion Volume I Part 2

The great criminals of Italy were unconscious of being criminals; the nation was unconscious of being sinful. Bembo's sonnets were the fit reading for Lucrezia Borgia; pastorals by Guarini the dramatic amus.e.m.e.nts of Rannuccio Farnesi; if Vittoria Accoramboni and Francesco Cenci read anything besides their prayerbook or ribald novels, it was some sugary "Aminta" or "Pastor Fido:" their own tragedies by Webster and Sh.e.l.ley they could never have understood.

And thus the Italians of the Renaissance walked placidly through the evil which surrounded them; for them, artists and poets, the sky was always blue and the sun always bright, and their art and their poetry were serene. But the Englishmen of the sixteenth century were astonished and fascinated by the evil of Italy: the dark pools of horror, the dabs of infamy which had met them ever and anon in the brilliant southern cities, haunted them like nightmare, bespattered for them the clear blue sky, and danced, black and horrible spots, before the face of the sun.

The remembrance of Italian wickedness weighed on them like an incubus, clung to them with a frightful fascination. While the foulest criminals of Italy discussed the platonic vapidnesses of Bembo's sonnets, and wept at the sweet and languid lamentations of Guarini's shepherds and nymphs; the strong Englishmen of the time of Shakespeare, the men whose children were to unsheathe under Cromwell the sword of righteousness, listened awe-stricken and fascinated with horror to the gloomy and convulsed, the grand and frightful plays of Webster and of Tourneur. And the sin of the Renaissance, which the art of Italy could neither pourtray nor perceive; appeared on the stage decked in superb and awful garb by the tragic imagination of Elizabethan England.

THE OUTDOOR POETRY.

The thought of winter is bleak and barren to our mind; the late year is chary of aesthetic as of all other food. In the country it does not bring ugliness; but it terribly reduces and simplifies things, depriving them of two-thirds of their beauty. In sweeping away the last yellow leaves, the last crimson clouds, and in bleaching the last green gra.s.s, it effaces a whole wealth of colour. It deprives us still more by actually diminis.h.i.+ng the number of forms: for what summer had left rich, various, complex, winter reduces to blank uniformity. There is a whole world of lovely things, shapes and tints, effects of light, colour, and perspective in a wood, as long as it is capriciously divided into a thousand nooks and crannies by projecting boughs, bushes, hedges, and hanging leaves; and this winter clears away and reduces to a Haussmanized simplicity of plan. There is a smaller world, yet one quite big enough for a summer's day, in any hay field, among the barren oats, the moon-daisies, the seeded gra.s.ses, the sorrel, the b.u.t.tercups, all making at a distance a wonderful blent effect of luminous brown and lilac and russet foamed with white; and forming, when you look close into it, an unlimited forest of delicately separate stems and bloom and seed; every plant detaching itself daintily from an undefinable background of things like itself. This winter turns into a rusty brown and green expanse, or into a bog, or a field of frozen upturned clods.

The very trees, stripped of their leaves, look as if prepared for diagrams of the abstraction tree. Everything, in short, is reduced most philosophically to its absolutely ultimate elements; and beauty is got rid of almost as completely as by a metaphysical definition. This aesthetic barrenness of winter is most of all felt in southern climates, to which it brings none of the harsh glitter and glamour of snow and ice; but leaves the frozen earth and leafless trees merely bare, without the crisp sheen of snow, the glint and glimmer of frost and icicles, forming for the denuded rigging of branches a fantastic system of ropes and folded sails. In the South, therefore, unless you go where winter never comes, and autumn merely merges into a lengthened spring, winter is more than ever negative, dreary, barren to our fancy. Yet even this southern winter gives one things, very lovely things: things which one scarcely notices perhaps, yet which would baffle the most skilled painter to imitate, the most skilled poet to describe. Thus, for instance, there is a peculiar kind of morning by no means uncommon in Tuscany in what is completely winter, not a remnant of autumn or a beginning of spring. It is cold, but windless; the sky full of sun, the earth full of mist. Sun and mist uniting into a pale luminousness in which all things lose body, become mere outline; bodiless hills taking shape where they touch the sky with their curve; clear line of irregular houses, of projecting ilex roundings and pointed cypresses marking the separation between hill and sky, the one scarcely more solid, corporeal than the other; the hill almost as blue as the sky, the sky almost as vaporous as the hill; the tangible often more ghostlike than the intangible. But the sun has smitten the higher hills, and the vapours have partially rolled down, in a scarcely visible fold, to their feet; and the high hill, not yet rock or earth, swells up into the sky as something real, but fluid and of infinite elasticity. All in front the plain is white with mist; or pinkish grey with the unseen agglomeration of bare tree boughs and trunks, of sere field; till, nearer us, the trees become more visible, the short vinebearing elms in the fields, interlacing their branches compressed by distance, the clumps of poplars, so scant and far between from nearly, so serried and compact from afar; and between them an occasional flush, a tawny vapour of the orange twigged osiers; and then, still nearer, the expanse of sere field, of mottled, crushed-together, yellowed gra.s.s and grey brown leaves; things of the summer which winter is burying to make room for spring. Along the reaches of the river the clumps of leafless poplars are grey against the pale, palest blue sky; grey but with a warmth of delicate brown, almost of rosiness. Grey also the s.h.i.+ngle in the river bed; the river itself either (if after rain) pale brown, streaked with pale blue sky reflections; or (after a drought), low, grey, luminous throughout its surface, you might think, were it not that the metallic sheen, the vacillating sparkles of where the sun, smiting down, frets it into a s.h.i.+fting ma.s.s of scintillating facets, gives you the impression that this other luminousness of silvery water must be dull and dead.

And, looking up the river, it gradually disappears, its place marked only, against the all-pervading pale blue haze, by the brownish grey spectre of the furthest poplar clumps.

This, I have said, is an effect which winter produces, nay, even a southern winter, with those comparatively few and slight elements at its disposal. We see it, notice it, and enjoy its delicate loveliness; but while so doing we do not think, or we forget, that the habit of noticing, nay, the power of perceiving such effects as this, is one of those habits and powers which we possess, so to speak, only since yesterday. The possibility of reproducing in painting effects like this one; or, more truthfully, the wish to reproduce them, is scarcely as old as our own century; it is, perhaps, the latest born of all our artistic wishes and possibilities. But the possibility of any visible effect being perceived and reproduced by the painter, usually precedes--at least where any kind of pictorial art already exists--the perception of such effects by those who are not painters, and the attempt to reproduce them by means of words. We do not care to admit that our grandfathers were too unlike ourselves, lest ourselves should be found too unlike our grandchildren. We hold to the metaphysic fiction of man having always been the same, and only his circ.u.mstances having changed; not admitting that the very change of circ.u.mstances implies something new in the man who altered them; and similarly we shrink from the thought of the many things which we used never to notice, and which it has required a cla.s.s of men endowed with special powers of vision to find out, copy, and teach us to see and appreciate. Yet there is scarcely one of us who has not a debt towards some painter or writer for first directing his attention to objects or effects which may have abounded around him, but unnoticed or confused with others. The painters, as I have said, the men who see more keenly and who study what they have seen, naturally come first; nor does the poet usually describe what his contemporary painter attempts not to paint. An exception might, perhaps, require to be made for Dante, who would seem to have seen and described many things left quite untouched by Giotto, and even by Raphael; but in estimating Dante we must be careful to distinguish the few touches which really belong to him, from the great ma.s.s of colour and detail which we have unconsciously added thereto, borrowing from our own experience and from innumerable pictures and poems which, at the moment, we may not in the least remember; and having done so, we shall be led to believe that those words which suggest to us so clear and coloured a vision of scenes often complex and uncommon, presented to his own mind only a comparatively simple and incomplete idea: the atmospheric effects, requiring a more modern painter than Turner, which we read between the lines of the "Inferno" and the "Purgatorio," most probably existed as little for Dante as they did for Giotto; the poet seeing and describing in reality only salient forms of earth and rock, monotonous in tint and deficient in air, like those in the backgrounds of mediaeval Tuscan frescoes and panels. Be this as it may, the fact grows daily on me that men have not at all times seen in the same degree the nature which has always equally surrounded them; and that during some periods they have, for explicable reasons, seen less not only than their successors, but also than their predecessors; and seen that little in a manner conventional in proportion to its monotony. There are things about which certain historic epochs are strangely silent; so much so, indeed, that the breaking of the silence impresses us almost as the more than human breaking of a spell; and that silence Is the result of a grievous wrong, of a moral disease which half closes the eyes of the fancy, or of a moral poison which presents to those sorely aching eyes only a glimmer amid darkness. And it is as the most singular instance of such conditions that I should wish to study, in themselves, their causes and effects, the great differences existing between the ancients and ourselves on the one hand, and the men of the genuine Middle Ages on the other, in the degree of interest taken respectively by each in external nature, the seasons and that rural life which seems to bring us into closest contact with them both.

There is, of course, a considerable difference between the manner in which the country, its aspects and occupations, are treated by the poets of Antiquity and by those of our own day; in the mode of enjoying them of an ancient who had read Theocritus and Virgil and Tibullus, and a modern whose mind is unconsciously full of the influence of Wordsworth or Sh.e.l.ley or Ruskin. But it is a mere difference of mode; and is not greater, I think, than the difference between the descriptions in the "Allegro," and the descriptions in "Men and Women;" than the difference between the love of our Elizabethans for the minuter details of the country, the flowers by the stream, the birds in the bushes, the ferrets, frogs, lizards, and similar small creatures; and the pleasure of our own contemporaries in the larger, more s.h.i.+fting, and perplexing forms and colours of cloud, sunlight, earth, and rock. The description of effects such as these latter ones, nay, the attention and appreciation given to them, are things of our own century, even as is the power and desire of painting them. Landscape, in the sense of our artists of to-day, is a very recent thing; so recent that even in the works of Turner, who was perhaps the earliest landscape painter in the modern sense, we are forced to separate from the real rendering of real effects, a great deal in which the tints of sky and sea are arranged and distributed as a mere vast conventional piece of decoration. Nor could it be otherwise. For, in poetry as in painting, landscape could become a separate and substantive art only when the interest in the mere ins and outs of human adventure, in the mere structure and movement of human limbs, had considerably diminished. There is room, in epic or drama, only for such little sc.r.a.ps of description as will make clearer, without checking, the human action; as there is place, in a fresco of a miracle, or a little picture of carousing and singing bacchantes and Venetian dandies, only for such little bits of laurel grove, or dim plain, or blue alpine crags, as can be introduced in the gaps between head and head, or figure and figure.

Thus, therefore, a great difference must exist between what would be felt and written about the country and the seasons by an ancient, by a man of the sixteenth century, or by a contemporary of our own: a difference, however, solely of mode; for we feel sure that of the three men each would find something to delight himself and wherewith to delight others among the elm-bounded English meadows, the fiat cornfields of central France, the vine and olive yards of Italy-- wherever, in short, he might find himself face to face and, so to speak, hand in hand with Nature. But about the man of the Middle Ages (unless, perhaps, in Italy, where the whole Middle Ages were merely an earlier Renaissance) we could have no such a.s.surance; nay, we might be persuaded that, however great his genius, be he even a Gottfried von Stra.s.sburg, or a Walther von der Vogelweide, or the unknown Frenchman who has left us "Auca.s.sin et Nicolette," he would bring back impressions only of two things, authorized and consecrated by the poetic routine of his contemporaries--of spring and of the woods.

There is nothing more characteristic of mediaeval poetry than this limitation. Of autumn, of winter; of the standing corn, the ripening fruit of summer; of all these things so dear to the ancients and to all men of modern times, the Middle Ages seem to know nothing. The autumn harvests, the mists and wondrous autumnal transfiguration of the humblest tree, or bracken, or bush; the white and glittering splendour of winter, and its cosy life by hearth or stove; the drowsiness of summer, its suddenly inspired wish for shade and dew and water, all this left them stolid. To move them was required the feeling of spring, the strongest, most complete and stirring impression which, in our temperate climates, can be given by Nature. The whole pleasurableness of warm air, clear moist sky, the surprise of the s.h.i.+mmer of pale green, of the yellowing blossom on tree tops, the first flicker of faint shadow where all has been uniform, colourless, shadeless; the replacing of the long silence by the endless twitter and trill of birds, endless in its way as is the sea, twitter and trill on every side, depths and depths of it, of every degree of distance and faintness, a sea of bird song; and along with this the sense of infinite renovation to all the earth and to man's own heart. Of all Nature's effects this one alone goes sparkling to the head; and it alone finds a response in mediaeval poetry. Spring, spring, endless spring--for three long centuries throughout the world a dreary green monotony of spring all over France, Provence, Italy, Spain, Germany, England; spring, spring, nothing but spring even in the mysterious countries governed by the Grail King, by the Fairy Morgana, by Queen Proserpine, by Prester John; nay, in the new Jerusalem, in the kingdom of Heaven itself, nothing but spring; till one longs for a bare twig, for a yellow leaf, for a frozen gutter, as for a draught of water in the desert. The green fields and meadows enamelled with painted flowers, how one detests them! how one would rejoice to see them well sprinkled with frost or burnt up to brown in the dry days! the birds, the birds which warble through every sonnet, canzone, sirventes, glosa, dance lay, roundelay, virelay, rondel, ballade, and whatsoever else it may be called,--how one wishes them silent for ever, or their twitter, the tarantarantandei of the eternal German nightingale especially, drowned by a good howling wind J After any persistent study of mediaeval poetry, one's feeling towards spring is just similar to that of the morbid creature in Schubert's "Mullerin," who would not stir from home for the dreadful, dreadful greenness, which he would fain bleach with tears, all around:

Ich mochte ziehn in die Welt hinaus, hinaus in die weite Welt, Wenn's nur so grun, so grun nicht war da draussen in Wald und Feld.

Moreover this mediaeval spring is the spring neither of the shepherd, nor of the farmer, nor of any man to whom spring brings work and anxiety and hope of gain; it is a mere vague spring of gentle-folk, or at all events of well-to-do burgesses, taking their pleasure on the lawns of castle parks, or the green holiday places close to the city, much as we see them in the first part of "Faust;" a sweet but monotonous charm of gra.s.s, beneath green lime tree, or in the South the elm or plane; under which are seated the poet and the fiddler, playing and singing for the young women, their hair woven with chaplets of fresh flowers, dancing upon the sward. And poet after poet, Provencal, Italian, and German, Nithart and Ulrich, and even the austere singer of the Holy Grail, Wolfram, pouring out verse after verse of the songs in praise of spring, which they make even as girls wind their garlands: songs of quaint and graceful ever-changing rythm, now slowly circling, now bounding along, now stamping out the measure like the feet of the dancers, now winding and turning as wind and twine their arms in the long-linked mazes; while the few and ever-repeated ideas, the old, stale plat.i.tudes of praise of woman, love pains, joys of dancing, pleasure of spring (spring, always spring, eternal, everlasting spring) seem languidly to follow the life and movement of the mere metre. Poets, these German, Provencal, French, and early Italian lyrists, essentially (if we venture to speak heresy) not of ideas or emotions, but of metre, of rythm and rhyme; with just the minimum of necessary thought, perpetually presented afresh just as the words, often and often repeated and broken up and new combined, of a piece of music--poetry which is in truth a sort of music, dance or dirge or hymn music as the case may be, more than anything else.

As it is in mediaeval poetry with the seasons, so it is likewise with the country and its occupations: as there is only spring, so there is only the forest. Of the forest, mediaeval poetry has indeed much to say; more perhaps, and more familiar with its pleasures, than Antiquity. There is the memorable forest where the heroes of the Nibelungen go to hunt, followed by their waggons of provisions and wine; where Siegfried overpowers the bear, and returns to his laughing comrades with the huge thing chained to his saddle; where, in that clear s.p.a.ce which we see so distinctly, a lawn on to which the blue black firs are encroaching, Siegfried stoops to drink of the spring beneath the lime tree, and Hagen drives his boarspear straight through the Nibelung's back. There is the thick wood, all a golden haze through the young green, and with an atmosphere of birds' song, where King Mark discovers Tristram and Iseult in the cave, the deceitful sword between them, as Gottfried von Stra.s.sburg relates with wonderful luscious charm. The forest, also, more bleak and austere, where the four outlawed sons of Aymon live upon roots and wild animals, where they build their castle by the Meuse. Further, and most lovely of all, the forest in which Nicolette makes herself a hut of branches, bracken, and flowers, through which the stars peep down on her whiteness as she dreams of her Lord Auca.s.sin. The forest where Huon meets Oberon; and Guy de Lusignan, the good snake-lady; and Parzival finds on the snow the feathers and the drops of blood which throw him into his long day-dream; and Owen discovers the tomb of Merlin; the forest, in short, which extends its interminable glades and serried ma.s.ses of trunks and arches of green from one end to the other of mediaeval poetry. It is very beautiful, this forest of the Middle Ages; but it is monotonous, melancholy; and has a terrible eeriness in its endlessness. For there is nothing else. There are no meadows where the cows lie lazily, no fields where the red and purple kerchiefs of the reapers overtop the high corn; no orchards, no hayfields; nothing like those hill slopes where the wild herbs encroach upon the vines, and the goats of Corydon and Damoetas require to be kept from mischief; where, a little lower down, the Athenian shopkeeper of Aristophanes goes daily to look whether yesterday's hard figs may not have ripened, or the vine wreaths pruned last week grown too lushly. Nor anything of the sort of those Umbrian meadows, where Virgil himself will stop and watch the white bullocks splas.h.i.+ng slowly into the shallow, sedgy c.l.i.tumnus; still less like those hamlets in the cornfields through which Propertius would stroll, following the jolting osier waggon, or the procession with garlands and lights to Pales or to the ochre-stained garden G.o.d. Nothing of all this: there are no cultivated spots in mediaeval poetry; the city only, and the castle, and the endless, all-encompa.s.sing forest.

And to this narrowness of mediaeval notions of outdoor life, inherited together with mediaeval subjects by the poets even of the sixteenth century, must be referred the curious difference existing between the romance poets of antiquity, like Homer in the Odyssey, and the romance poets--Boiardo, Ariosto, Ta.s.so, Spenser, Camoens--of modern times, in the matter of--how shall I express it?--the ideal life, the fortunate realms, the "Kennaqwhere." In Homer, in all the ancients, the ideal country is merely a more delightful reality; and its inhabitants happier everyday men and women; in the poetry sprung from the Middle Ages it is always a fairy-land constructed by mechanicians and architects. For, as we have seen, the Middle Ages could bequeath to the sixteenth century no ideal of peaceful outdoor enjoyment. Hence, in the poetry of the sixteenth century, still permeated by mediaeval traditions, an appalling artificiality of delightfulness. Fallerina, Alcina, Armida, Acrasia, all imitated from the original Calypso, are not strong and splendid G.o.d-women, living among the fields and orchards, but dainty ladies hidden in elaborate gardens, all bedizened with fas.h.i.+onable architecture: regular palaces, pleasaunces, with uncomfortable edifices, artificial waterfalls, labyrinths, rare and monstrous plants, parrots, apes, giraffes; childish splendours of gardening and engineering and menageries, which we meet already in "Ogier the Dane" and "Huon of Bordeaux," and which later poets epitomized out of the endless descriptions of Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," the still more frightful inventories of the Amadis romances. They are, each of them, a kind of antic.i.p.ated Marly, Versailles, Prince Elector's Friedrichsruhe or Nymphenburg, with clipped cypresses and yews, doubtless, and (O Pales and Pan!) flower-beds filled with coloured plaster and spas, and cascades spirting out (thanks to fifty invisible pumps) under your feet and over your head. All the vineyards and cornfields have been swept away to make these solemn terraces and water-works; all the cottages which, with their little wooden shrine, their humble enclosure of sunflowers and rosemary and fruit trees, their buzzing hives and barking dogs, were loved and sung even by town rakes like Catullus and smart coffeehouse wits like Horace; all these have been swept away to be replaced by the carefully constructed (? wire) bowers, the aviaries, the porticoes, the frightful circular edifice (_tondo e il ricco edificio_), a masterpiece of Palladian stucco work, in which Armida and Rinaldo, Acrasia and her Knight, drearily disport themselves. What has become of Calypso's island? of the orchards of Alcinous? What would the n.o.ble knights and ladies of Ariosto and Spenser think of them? What would they say, these romantic, dainty creatures, were they to meet Nausicaa with the washed linen piled on her waggon? Alas! they would take her for a laundress. For it is the terrible aristocratic idleness of the Middle Ages, their dreary delicacy, which hampers Boiardo, Ariosto, Ta.s.so, Spenser, even in the midst of their most unblus.h.i.+ng plagiarisms from Antiquity: their heroes and heroines have been brought up, surrounded by equerries and duennas, elegant, useless things, or at best (the knights at least) good only for aristocratic warfare. Plough or prune! defile the knightly hands! wash or cook, ply the loom like Nausicaa, Calypso, or Penelope! The mere thought sends them very nearly into a faint. No: the ladies of mediaeval romance must sit quiet, idle; at most they may sing to the lute; and if they work with their hands, it must be some dreary, strictly useless, piece of fancy work; they are hot-house plants, all these dainty folk.

Had they no eyes, then, these poets of the Middle Ages, that they could see, among all the things of Nature, only those few which had been seen by their predecessors? At first one feels tempted to think so, till the recollection of many vivid touches in spring and forest descriptions persuades one that, enormous as was the sway of tradition among these men, they were not all of them, nor always, repeating mere conventional plat.i.tudes. This singular limitation in the mediaeval perceptions of Nature--a limitation so important as almost to make it appear as if the Middle Ages had not perceived Nature at all--is most frequently attributed to the prevalence of asceticism, which, according to some critics, made all mediaeval men into so many repet.i.tions of Bernard of Clairvaux, of whom it is written that, being asked his opinion of Lake Leman, he answered with surprise that, during his journey from Geneva to the Rhone Valley, he had remarked no lake whatever, so absorbed had he been in spiritual meditations. But the predominance of asceticism has been grossly exaggerated. It was a state of moral tension which could not exist uninterruptedly, and could exist only in the cla.s.ses for whom poetry was not written. The mischief done by asceticism was the warping of the moral nature of men, not of their aesthetic feelings; it had no influence upon the vast numbers, the men and women who relished the profane and obscene fleshliness and buffoonery of stage plays and fabliaux, and those who favoured the delicate and exquisite immoralities of Courtly poetry. Indeed, the presence of whole cla.s.ses of writings, of which such things as Boccaccio's Tales, "The Wife of Bath," and Villon's "Ballades," on the one hand, and the songs of the troubadours, the poem of Gottfried, and the romance or rather novel of "Flamenca," are respectively but the most conspicuous examples, ought to prove only too clearly that the Middle Ages, for all their asceticism, were both as gross and as aesthetic in sensualism as antiquity had been before them.

We must, therefore, seek elsewhere than in asceticism, necessarily limited, and excluding the poetry-reading public, for an explanation of this peculiarity of mediaeval poetry. And we shall find it, I think, in that which during the Middle Ages could, because it was an all-regulating social condition, really create universal habits of thought and feeling, namely, feudalism. A moral condition like asceticism must leave unbia.s.sed all such minds as are incapable of feeling it; but a social inst.i.tution like feudalism walls in the life of every individual, and forces his intellectual movements into given paths; nor is there any escape, excepting in places where, as in Italy and in the free towns of the North, the feudal conditions are wholly or partially unknown. To feudalism, therefore, would I ascribe this, which appears at first so purely aesthetic, as opposed to social, a characteristic of the Middle Ages. Ever since Schiller, in his "G.o.ds of Greece," spoke for the first time of undivinized Nature (_die entgotterte Natur_), it has been the fas.h.i.+on among certain critics to fall foul of Christianity for having robbed the fields and woods of their G.o.ds, and reduced to mere manured clods the things which had been held sacred by antiquity. Desecrated in those long mediaeval centuries Nature may truly have been, but not by the holy water of Christian priests. Desecrated because out of the fields and meadows was driven a divinity greater than Pales or Vertumnus or mighty Pan, the divinity called _Man_. For in the terrible times when civilization was at its lowest, the things of the world had been newly allotted; and by this new allotment, man--the man who thinks and loves and hopes and strives, man who fights and sings--was shut out from the fields and meadows, forbidden the labour, nay, almost the sight, of the earth; and to the tending of kine, and sowing of crops, to all those occupations which antiquity had a.s.sociated with piety and righteousness, had deemed worthy of the G.o.ds themselves, was a.s.signed, or rather condemned, a creature whom every advancing year untaught to think or love, or hope, or fight, or strive; but taught most utterly to suffer and to despair. For a man it is difficult to call him, this mediaeval serf, this lump of earth detached from the field and wrought into a semblance of manhood, merely that the soil of which it is part should be delved and sown, and then manured with its carca.s.s or its blood; nor as a man did the Middle Ages conceive it. The serf was not even allowed human progenitors: his foul breed had originated in an obscene miracle; his stupidity and ferocity were as those of the beasts; his cunning was demoniac; he was born under G.o.d's curse; no words could paint his wickedness, no persecutions could exceed his deserts; the whole world turned pale at his crime, for he it was, he and not any human creature, who had nailed Christ upon the cross. Like the hunger and sores of a fox or a wolf, his hunger and his sores are forgotten, never noticed. Were it not that legal and ecclesiastical narratives of trials (not of feudal lords for crus.h.i.+ng and contaminating their peasants, but of peasants for spitting out and trampling on the consecrated wafer) give us a large amount of pedantically stated detail; tell us how misery begat vice, and filth and starvation united families in complicated meshes of incest, taught them depopulation as a virtue and a necessity; and how the despair of any joy in nature, of any mercy from G.o.d, hounded men and women into the unspeakable orgies, the obscene parodies, of devil wors.h.i.+p; were it not for these horrible shreds of judicial evidence (as of tatters of clothes or blood-clotted hairs on the shoes of a murderer) we should know little or nothing of the life of the men and women who, in mediaeval France and Germany, did the work which had been taught by Hesiod and Virgil. About all these tragedies the literature of the Middle Ages, ready to show us town vice and town horror, dens of prost.i.tution and creaking, overweighted gibbets, as in Villon's poems, utters not a word. All that we can hear is the many-throated yell of mediaeval poets, n.o.ble and plebeian, French, Provencal, and German, against the brutishness, the cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness, the heresy of the serf, whose name becomes synonymous with every baseness; which, in mock grammatical style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness; whose punishment is prayed for from the G.o.d whom he outrages by his very existence; a hideous clamour of indecent jibe, of brutal vituperation, of senseless accusation, of every form of words which furious hatred can a.s.sume, whose echoes reached even countries like Tuscany, where serfdom was well nigh unknown, and have reached even to us in the sc.r.a.ps of epigram still bandied about by the townsfolk against the peasants, nay, by the peasants against themselves.[1] A monstrous rag doll, dressed up in shreds of many-coloured villainy without a recognizable human feature, dragged in mud, pilloried with unspeakable ordure, paraded in mock triumph like a King of Fools, and burnt in the market-place like Antichrist, such is the image which mediaeval poetry has left us of the creature who was once the pious rustic, the innocent G.o.d-beloved husbandman, on whose threshold justice stopped a while when she fled from the towns of Antiquity.

[1] The reader may oppose to my views the existence of the--cla.s.s of poems, French, Latin, and German, of which the Provencal Pastourela is the original type, and which represent the courting, by the poet, who is, of course, a knight, of a beautiful country-girl, who is shown us as feeding her sheep or spinning with her distaff. But these poems are, to the best of my knowledge, all of a single pattern, and extremely insincere and artificial in tone, that I feel inclined to cla.s.s them with the pastorals--Dresden china idylls by men who had never looked a live peasant in the face--of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, --as distant descendants from the pastoral poetry of antiquity, of which the chivalric poets may have got some indirect notions as they did of the antique epics. It is moreover extremely the likely that these love poems, in which, successfully or unsuccessfully, the poet usually offers a bribe to the woman of low degree, conceal beneath the conventional pastoral trappings the intrigues of minnesingers and troubadours with women of the small artizan or village proprietor cla.s.s. The real peasant woman--the female of the villain--could scarcely have been above the notice of the n.o.blemen's servants; and, in countries where the seigneurial rights were in vigour, would scarcely have been offered presents and fine words. As regards the innumerable poems against the peasantry, I may refer the reader to an extremely curious publication of "Carmina Medii aevi," recently made by Sig. Francesco Novati, and which contains, besides a selection of specimens, a list of references on the subject of poems "De Natura Rusticorum." One of the satirical declensions runs as follows:

Singulariter. Pluraliter.

Nom. Hic villa.n.u.s. Nom. Hi maledicti.

Gen. Huius rustici. Gen. Horum tristium.

Dat. Huic tferfero (_sic_). Dat. His mendacibus.

Acc. Hunc furem. Acc. Hos nequissimos.

Voc. O latro. Voc. O pessimi.

Abl. Ab hoc depredatore. Abl. Ab his infidelibus.

The accusation of heresy and of crucifying Christ is evidently due to the devil-wors.h.i.+p prevalent among the serfs, and is thus, alluded to in a north Italian poem, probably borrowed from the French:

Christo fo da villan crucifi, E stagom sempre in pioza, in vento, e in neve, Perche havom fato cosi gran pecca.

This feeling is exactly a.n.a.logous to that existing nowadays in semi-barbarous countries against the Jews. The idle hated the industrious, and hated them all the more when their industry brought them any profit.]

Yet not so; I can recall one, though only one, occasion in which mediaeval literature shows us the serf. The place is surely the most unexpected, the charming thirteenth century tale of "Auca.s.sin et Nicolette." In his beautiful essay upon that story, Mr. Pater has deliberately omitted this episode, which is indeed like a spot of blood-stained mud upon some perfect tissue of silver flowers on silver ground. It is a piece of cruellest realism, because quite quiet and unforced, in the midst of a kind of fairy-land idyl of almost childish love, the love of the beautiful son of the lord of Beaucaire for a beautiful Saracen slave girl. For, although Auca.s.sin and Nicolette are often separated, and always disconsolate--she in her wonderfully frescoed vaulted room, he in his town prison--there is always surrounding them a sort of fairy land of trees and flowers, a constant song of birds; although they wander through the woods and tear their delicate skin, and catch their hair in brambles and briars, we have always the sense of the daisies bending beneath their tread, of the green leaves rustling aside from their heads covered with hair--"blond et menu crespele." Their very hards.h.i.+ps are lovely, like the hut of flowering branches and grapes, which Nicolette builds for herself, and through whose fissures the moonlight s.h.i.+nes and the little stars twinkle: so much so, that when they weep, these two beautiful and dainty creatures, we listen as if to singing, and with no more sense of grief than at some pathetic little s.n.a.t.c.h of melody. And in the midst of this idyl of lovely things; in the midst of all these delicate patternings, whose minuteness and faint tint merge into one vague pleasurable impression; stands out, unintentionally placed there by the author, little aware of its terrible tragic realism, the episode which I am going to translate.

"Thus Auca.s.sin wandered all day through the forest, without hearing any news of his sweet love; and when he saw that dusk was spreading, he began bitterly to weep. As he was riding along an old road, where weeds and gra.s.s grew thick and high, he suddenly saw before him, in the middle of this road, a man such as I am going to describe to you. He was tall, ugly; nay, hideous quite marvellously. His face was blacker than smoked meat, and so wide, that there was a good palm's distance between his eyes; his cheeks were huge, his nostrils also, with a very big flat nose; thick lips as red as embers, and long teeth yellow and smoke colour. He wore leathern shoes and gaiters, kept up with string at the knees; on his back was a parti-coloured coat. He was leaning upon a stout bludgeon. Auca.s.sin was startled and fearful, and said:

"'Fair brother ("beau frere"--a greeting corresponding to the modern "bon homme")! G.o.d be with thee!'

"'G.o.d bless you!' answered the man.

"'What dost thou here?' asked Auca.s.sin.

"'What is that to you?' answered the man.

"'I ask thee from no evil motive.'

"'Then tell me why,' said the man, 'you yourself are weeping with such grief? Truly, were I a rich man like you, nothing in the world should make me weep.'

"'And how dost thou know me?'

"'I know you to be Auca.s.sin, the son of the Count; and if you will tell me why you weep, I will tell you why I am here.'

"'I will tell thee willingly,' answered Auca.s.sin. 'This morning I came to hunt in the forest; I had a white leveret, the fairest in the world; I have lost him--that is why I am weeping.'

"'What!' cried the man;' it is for a stinking hound that you waste the tears of your body? Woe to those who shall pity you; you, the richest man of this country. If your father wanted fifteen or twenty white leverets, he could get them. I am weeping and mourning for more serious matters.'

"'And what are these?'

"'I will tell you. I was hired to a rich farmer to drive his plough, dragged by four bullocks. Three days ago, I lost a red bullock, the best of the four. I left the plough, and sought the red bullock on all sides, but could not find him. For three days I have neither eaten nor drunk, and have been wandering thus. I have been afraid of going to the town, where they would put me in jail, because I have not wherewith to pay for the bullock. All I possess are the clothes on my back. I have a mother; and the poor woman had nothing more valuable than me; since she had only an old smock wherewith to cover her poor old limbs. They have torn the smock off her back, and now she has to lie on the straw. It is about her that I am afflicted more than about myself, because, as to me, I may get some money some day or other, and as to the red bullock, he may be paid for when he may. And I should never weep for such a trifle as that. Ah! woe betide those who shall make sorrow with you!'"

Inserted merely to give occasion to show Auca.s.sin's good heart in paying the twenty _sols_ for the man's red bullock; perhaps for no reason at all, but certainly with no idea of making the lover's misery seem by comparison trifling--there are, nevertheless, few things in literature more striking than the meeting in the wood of the daintily nurtured boy, weeping over the girl whom he loves with almost childish love of the fancy; and of that ragged, tattered, hideous serf, at whose very aspect the Bel Auca.s.sin stops in awe and terror. And the att.i.tude is grand of this unfortunate creature, who neither begs nor threatens, scarcely complains, and not at all for himself; but merely tells his sordid misfortune with calm resignation, as if used to such everyday miseries, roused to indignation only at the sight of the tears which the fine-bred youth is shedding. We feel the dreadful solemnity of the man's words; of the reproach thus thrown by the long-suffering serf, accustomed to misfortunes as the lean ox is to blows, to that delicate thing weeping for his lady love, for the lady of his fancy. It is the one occasion upon which that delicate and fantastic mediaeval love poetry, that fanciful, wistful stripling King Love of the Middle Ages, in which he keeps high court, and through which he rides in triumphal procession; that King Love laughing and fainting by turns with all his dapper artificiality of woes; is confronted with the sordid reality, the tragic impersonation of all the dumb miseries, the lives and loves, crushed and defiled unnoticed, of the peasantry of those days. Yes, while they sing--Provencals, minnesingers, Sicilians, sing of their earthly lady and of their paramour in heaven--the hideous peasant, whose naked granny is starving on the straw, looks on with dull and tearless eyes; crying out to posterity, as the serf cries to Auca.s.sin: "Woe to those who shall sorrow at the tears of such as these."

II.

But meanwhile, during those centuries which lie between the dark ages and modern times, the Middle Ages (inasmuch as they mean not a mere chronological period, but a definite social and mental condition) fortunately did not exist everywhere. Had they existed, it is almost impossible to understand how they would ever throughout Europe have come to an end; for as the favourite proverb of Catharine of Siena has it, one dead man cannot bury another dead man; and the Middle Ages, after this tedious dying of the fifteenth century, required to be shovelled into the tomb, nay, rather, given the final stroke, by the Renaissance.

This that we foolishly call--giving a quite incorrect notion of sudden and miraculous birth--the Renaissance, and limit to the time of the revival of Greek humanities, really existed, as I have repeatedly suggested wherever, during the mediaeval centuries, the civilization of which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were big was not, by the pressure of feudalism and monasticism, made to be abortive or stillborn.

Low as was Italy at the very close of the dark ages, and much as she borrowed for a long while from the more precocious northern nations, especially France and Provence; Italy had, nevertheless, an enormous advantage in the fact that her populations were not divided into victor and vanquished, and that the old Latin inst.i.tutions of town and country were never replaced, except in certain northern and southern districts, by feudal arrangements. The very first thing which strikes us in the obscure Italian commonwealths of early times, is that in these resuscitated relics of Roman or Etruscan towns there is no feeling of feudal superiority and inferiority; that there is no lord, and consequently no serf. Nor is this the case merely within the city walls.

The never sufficiently appreciated difference between the Italian free burghs and those of Germany, Flanders, and Provence, is that the citizens depend only in the remotest and most purely fict.i.tious way upon any kind of suzerain; and moreover that the country, instead of belonging to feudal n.o.bles, belong every day more and more completely to the burghers. The peasant is not a serf, but one of three things--a hired labourer, a possessor of property, or a farmer, liable to no taxes, paying no rent, and only sharing with the proprietor the produce of the land. By this latter system, existing, then as now, throughout Tuscany, the peasantry was an independent and well-to-do cla.s.s. The land owned by one man (who, in the commonwealths, was usually a shopkeeper or manufacturer in the town) was divided into farms small enough to be cultivated--vines, olives, corn, and fruit--by one family of peasants, helped perhaps by a paid labourer. The thriftier and less scrupulous peasants could, in good seasons, put by sufficient profit from their share of the produce to suffice after some years, and with the addition of what the women might make by was.h.i.+ng, spinning, weaving, plaiting straw hats (an accomplishment greatly insisted upon by Lorenzo dei Medici), and so forth, to purchase some small strip of land of their own. Hence, a cla.s.s of farmers at once living on another man's land and sharing its produce with him, and cultivating and paying taxes upon land belonging to themselves.

Of these Tuscan peasants we get occasional glimpses in the mediaeval Italian novelists--a well-to-do set of people, in constant communication with the town where they sell their corn, oil, vegetables, and wine, and easily getting confused with the lower cla.s.s of artizans with whom they doubtless largely intermarried. These peasants whom we see in tidy kilted tunics and leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock carts, or riding their mules up to the red city gates in many a Florentine and Sienese painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were in many respects better off than the small artizans of the city, heaped up in squalid houses, and oppressed by the greater and smaller guilds. Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching thrift to his sons in Alberti's charming treatise on "The Government of the Family,"

frequently groans over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry; and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible to cope with them--a conclusion which would have greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal proprietors in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps. Indeed it is impossible to conceive a stranger contrast than that between the northern peasant, the starved and stunted serf, whom Holbein drew, driving his lean horses across the hard furrow, with compa.s.sionate Death helping along the plough, and the Tuscan farmer, as shown us by Lorenzo dei Medici--the young fellow who, while not above minding his cows or hoeing up his field, goes into Florence once a week, offers his sweetheart presents of coral necklaces, silk staylaces, and paint for her cheeks and eyelashes; who promises, to please her, to have his hair frizzled (as only the youths of the Renaissance knew how to be frizzled and fuzzed) by the barber, and even dimly hints that some day he may appear in silken jerkin and tight hose, like a well-to-do burgess. No greater contrast perhaps, unless indeed we should compare his sweetheart, Lorenzo's beautiful Nenciozza, with her box full of jewels, her Sunday garb of damask kirtle and gold-worked bodice, her almost queenly ways towards her adorers, with the wretched creature, not a woman, but a mere female animal, cowering among her starving children in her mud cottage, and looking forward, in dull lethargy, after the morning full of outrages at the castle, to the night, the night on the heath, lit with mysterious flickers, to the horrible joys of the sacrifice which the oppressed brings to the dethroned, the serf to Satan; when, in short, we compare the peasant woman described by Lorenzo with the female serf resuscitated by the genius of Michelet; nay, more poignant still, with that mother in the "Dance of Death," seated on the mud flood of the broken-roofed, dismantled hovel, stewing something on a fire of twigs, and stretching out vain arms to her poor tattered baby-boy, whom, with the good-humoured tripping step of an old nurse, the kindly skeleton is leading away out of this cruel world.

Such were the conditions of the peasantry of the great Italian commonwealths. They were, as much as the northern serfs were the reverse, creatures pleasant to deal with, pleasant to watch.