Renaissance Fancies and Studies Part 1

Renaissance Fancies and Studies.

by Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee).

PREFACE

These essays being mainly the outcome of direct personal impressions of certain works of art and literature, and of the places in which they were produced, I have but few acknowledgments to make to the authors of books treating of the same subject. Among the exceptions to this rule, I must mention foremost Professor Tocco's _Eresia nel Medio Evo_, Monsieur Gebhart's _Italie Mystique_, and Monsieur Paul Sabatier's _St. Francois d'a.s.sise_.

I am, on the other hand, very deeply indebted to the conversation and advice of certain among my friends, for furnis.h.i.+ng me second-hand a little of that archaeological and critical knowledge which is now-a-days quite unattainable save by highly trained specialists. My best thanks, therefore, to Miss Eugenie Sellers, editor of Furtw.a.n.gler's "Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture;" to Mr. Bernhard Berenson, author of "Venetian Painters," and a monograph on Lorenzo Lotto; and particularly to my friend Mrs. Mary Logan, whose learned catalogue of the Italian paintings at Hampton Court is sufficient warrant for the correctness of my art-historical statements, which she has had the kindness to revise.

MAIANO, NEAR FLORENCE,

_April_ 1895.

THE LOVE OF THE SAINTS

I

"Panis Angelicus fit panis hominum. O res mirabilis, manducat Dominum Pauper, Servus et Humilis." These words of the Matins of the Most Holy Sacrament I heard for the first time many years ago, to the beautiful and inappropriate music of Cherubini. They struck me at that time as foolish, barbarous, and almost gross; but since then I have learned to think of them, and in a measure to feel of them, as of something greater and more solemn than all the music that Cherubini ever wrote.

All the hymns of the same date are, indeed, things to think upon. They affect one--the "Stabat Mater," for instance, and the "Ave Verum"--very much in the same way as the figures which stare down, dingy green and blue, from the gold of the Cosmati's mosaics: childish, dreary, all stiff and agape, but so solemn and pathetic, and full of the greatest future. For out of those Cosmati mosaics, and those barbarous frescoes of the old basilicas, will come Giotto and all the Renaissance; and out of those Church songs will come Dante; they are all signs, poor primitive rhymes and primitive figures, that the world is teeming again, and will bear, for centuries to come, new spiritual wonders. Hence the importance, the venerableness of all those mediaeval hymns. But of none so much, to my mind, as of those words I have quoted from the Matins of the Most Holy Sacrament--

"O res mirabilis, manducat Dominum, Pauper, Servus et Humilis."

For their crude and pathetic literality, their image of the G.o.dhead actually giving Himself, as they emphatically say, to be _chewed_ by the poor and humble man and the serf, show them to have been most especially born, abortions though they be, in the mightiest throes of mystical feeling, after the incubation of whole nations, born of the great mediaeval marriage, sublime, grotesque, morbid, yet health-bringing, between abstract idealising religious thought and the earthly affections of lovers and parents--a strange marriage, like that of St. Francis and Poverty, of which the modern soul also had to be born anew.

Indeed, if we realise in the least what this hymn must have meant, shouted in the processions of Flagellants, chaunted in the Pacts of Peace after internecine town wars; above all, perhaps, muttered in the cell of the friar, in the den of the weaver; if we sum up, however inadequately, the state of things whence it arose, and whence it helped to deliver us, we may think that the greatest music is scarcely reverent enough to accompany these poor blundering rhymes.

The Feast of the Most Holy Sacrament, to whose liturgy this hymn, "O Res Mirabilis," belongs, was inst.i.tuted to commemorate the miracle of Bolsena, which, coming late as it did, in the country of St. Francis, and within two years of the birth of Dante, seems in its significant coincidences, in its startling symbolism, the fit material summing up of what is conveniently designated as the Franciscan revival: the introduction into religious matters of pa.s.sionate human emotion. For in the year 1263, at Bolsena in Umbria, the consecrated wafer dropped blood upon the hands of an unbelieving priest.

This trickery of a single individual, or more probably hallucination--this lie and self-delusion of interested or foolish bystanders--just happened to symbolise a very great reality. For during the earlier Middle Ages, before the coming of Francis of a.s.sisi, the souls of men, or, more properly, their hearts, had been sorely troubled and jeopardised.

The mixture of races and civilisations, southern and northern and eastern, antique and barbarian, which had been slowly taking place ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, had seemed, in its consummation of the twelfth century, less fertile on the whole than poisonous. The old tribal system, the old civic system, triumphant centralising imperialism, had all been broken up long since; and now feudalism was going to pieces in its turn, leaving a chaos of filibustering princelets, among whom loomed the equivocal figures of Provencal counts, of Angevin and Swabian kings, brutal as men of the North, and lax as men of the South; moreover, suspiciously oriental; brilliant and cynical persons, eventually to be typified in Frederick II., who was judiciously suspected of being Antichrist in person. In the midst of this anarchy, over-rapid industrial development had moreover begotten the tendencies to promiscuity, to mystical communism, always expressive of deep popular misery. The Holy Land had become a freebooter's Eldorado; the defenders of Christ's sepulchre were turned half-Saracen, infected with unclean mixtures of creeds. Theology was divided between neo-Aristotelean logic, abstract and arid, and Alexandrian esoteric mysticism, quietistic, nay, nihilistic; and the Church had ceased to answer to any spiritual wants of the people.

Meanwhile, on all sides everywhere, heresies were teeming, austere and equivocal, pure and unclean according to individuals, but all of them anarchical, and therefore destructive at a moment when, above all, order and discipline were wanted. The belief in the world's end, in the speedy coming of Antichrist and the Messiah, was rife among all sects; and learned men, the disciples of Joachim of Flora, were busy calculating the very year and month. Lombardy, and most probably the south of France, Flanders and the Rhine towns, were full of strange Manichean theosophies, pessimistic dualism of G.o.d and devil, in which G.o.d always got the worst of it, when G.o.d did not happen to be the devil himself. The ravening lions, the clawing, tearing griffins, the nightmare brood carved on the capitals, porches, and pulpits of pre-Franciscan churches, are surely not, as orthodox antiquarians a.s.sure us, mere fanciful symbols of the Church's vigilance and virtues: they express too well the far-spread occult Manichean spirit, the belief in a triumphant power of evil.

Michelet, I think, has remarked that there was a moment in the early Middle Ages when, in the mixture of all contrary things, in the very excess of spiritual movement, there seemed a possibility of dead level, of stagnation, of the peoples of Europe becoming perhaps b.a.s.t.a.r.d Saracens, as in Merovingian times they had become b.a.s.t.a.r.d Romans; a chance of Byzantinism in the West. Be this as it may, it seems certain that, towards the end of the twelfth century, men's souls were shaken, crumbling, and what was worse, excessively arid. There was as little certainty of salvation as in the heart of that Priest saying Ma.s.s at Bolsena; but the miracle came to mankind at large some seventy years before it came to him. It had begun, no doubt, unnoticed in scores of obscure heresies, in hundreds of unnoticed individuals; it became manifest to all the world in the persons of Dominick, of Elizabeth of Hungary, of King Lewis--above all, of Francis of a.s.sisi. As in the hands of the doubting priest, so in the hands of all suffering mankind, the mystic wafer broke, proving itself true food for the soul: the life-blood of hope and love welled forth and fertilised the world. For the second time, and in far more humble and efficacious way, Christ had been given to man.

To absorb the Eternal Love, to feed on the Life of the World, to make oneself consubstantial therewith, these pa.s.sionate joys of poor mediaeval humanity are such as we should contemplate with sympathy only and respect, even when the miracle is conceived and felt in the grossest, least spiritual manner. That act of material a.s.similation, that feeding off the very G.o.dhead in most literal manner, as described in the hymn to the Most Holy Sacrament, was symbolic of the return from exile of the long-persecuted instincts of mankind. It meant that, spiritually or grossly, each according to his nature, men had cast fear behind them, and--O res mirabilis!--grown proud once more to love.

Of this new wonder--questionable enough at times, but, on the whole, marvellously beneficent--the German knightly poets, so early in the field, are naturally among the earliest (for the Provencals belonged to a sceptical, sensual country) to give us a written record. Nearly all of the Minnesingers composed what we must call religious erotics, in no way different, save for names of Christ and the Virgin, from their most impa.s.sioned secular ones. The Song of Solomon, therefore, is one of the few pieces of written literature of which we find constant traces in the works of these very literally illiterate poets. Yet the quality of their love, if one may say so, is very different from anything Hebrew, or, for the matter of that, Greek or Roman; their ardour is not a transient phenomenon which disturbs them, like that of the Shulamite, or the lover described by Sappho or Plato, but a chief business of their life, as in the case of Dante, of Petrarch, of Francesca and Paolo, or Tristram and Yseult. Indeed, it is difficult to guess whether this self-satisfied, self-glorifying quality, which distinguishes mediaeval pa.s.sion from the pa.s.sion (always regarded as an interlude, harmless or hurtful, in civic concerns) of unromantic Antiquity--whether, I say, this peculiarity of mediaeval love is due to its having served for religious as well as for secular use, or whether the possibility of its being brought into connection with the highest mysteries and aspirations was not itself a result of the dignity in which mere earthly ardours had come to be held.

Be this as it may, these German devotional rhapsodies display their essentially un-Hebrew, un-antique characters only the more by the traces of the _canticus canticorum_ in them, as in all devout love lyrics.

Any one curious in such matters may turn to a very striking poem by Dante's contemporary, Frauenlob, in Von der Hagen's great collection.

Also to a very strange composition, from the heyday of minne-song, by Heinrich von Meissen. This is not the furious love ode, but the ceremonious epithalamium of devotional poetry. It is the bearing in triumph, among flare of torches and incense smoke, over flower-strewn streets and beneath triumphal arches, of the Bride of the Soul, her enthroning on a stately couch, like some new-wed Moorish woman, for men to come and covet and admire. Above all, and giving one a shock of surprise by a.s.sociation with the man's other work, is a very long and elaborate poem addressed to Christ or G.o.d by no less a minnesinger than Master Gottfried of Strasburg. In it the Beloved is compared to all the things desired by eye or ear or taste or smell: cool water and fruit slaking feverish thirst, lilies with vertiginous scent, wine firing the blood, music wakening tears, precious stones of Augsburger merchants, essences and spices of an Eastern cargo:--

"Ach herzen Trut, genaden vol, Ach wol u je mer mere wol, Ein suez in Arzenie Ach herzen bruch, ach herzen not.

Ach Rose rot, Ach rose wandels vrie!

Ach jugend in jugent, ach jugender Muot, Ach bluejender herzen Minne!"

And so on for pages; the sort of words which poor Brangwain may have overheard on the calm sea, when the terrible knowledge rushed cold to her heart that Tristram and Yseult had drained the fatal potion.

All this is foolish and unwholesome enough, just twice as much so, for its spiritual allegorising, as the worldly love poetry of these often foolish and unwholesome German chivalrous poets. But, for our consolation, in that same huge collection of Von der Hagen's Minnesingers, stand the following six lines, addressed to the Saviour, if tradition is correct, by a knightly monk, Bruder Wernher von der Tegernsee:--

"Du bist min, ih bin din; Des solt du gewis sin.

Du bist beslozzen In minem herzen; _Verlorn ist daz sluzzelin: Du muost immer drinne sin._"

"Thou art locked up in my heart; the little key is lost; thou must remain inside."

This is a way of loving not logically suitable, perhaps, to a divine essence, but it is the lovingness which fertilises the soul, and makes flowers bud and birds sing in the heart of man. Out of it, through simple creatures like Bruder Wernher, through the simplicity of scores of obscurer singers and craftsmen than he, of hundreds of nameless good men and women, comes one large half of the art of Dante and Giotto, nay, of Raphael and Shakespeare: the tenderness of the modern world, unknown to stoical Antiquity.

II

The early Middle Ages--the times before Love came, and with it the gradual dignifying of all realities which had been left so long to mere gross or cunning or violent men--the early Middle Ages have left behind them one of the most complete and wonderful of human doc.u.ments, the letters of Abelard and Helose. This is a book which each of us should read, in order to learn, with terror and self-gratulation, how the aridity of the world's soul may neutralise the greatest individual powers for happiness and good. These letters are as chains which we should keep in our dwelling-place, to remind us of past servitude, perhaps to warn us against future.

No other two individuals could have been found to ill.u.s.trate, by the force of contrast, the intellectual and moral aridity of that eleventh century, which yet, in a degree, was itself a beginning of better things.

For Helose and Abelard were not merely among the finest intellects of the Middle Ages; they were both, in different ways, to the highest degree pa.s.sionately innovating natures. No woman has ever been more rich and bold and warm of mind and heart than Helose; nor has any woman ever questioned the unquestioned ideas and inst.i.tutions of her age, of any age, with such vehemence and certainty of intuition. She judges questions which are barely asked and judged of now-a-days, applying to consecrated sentimentality the long-lost instinctive human rationalism of the ancient philosophers. How could St. Luke recommend us to desist from getting back our stolen property? She feels, however obscurely, that this is foolish, antisocial, unnatural. Nay, why should G.o.d prefer the penitence of one sinner to the constant goodness of ninety-nine righteous men? She is, this learned theologian of the eleventh century, as pa.s.sionately human in thought as any Mme. Roland or Mary Wolstonecraft of a hundred years ago.

Abelard, on the other hand, we know to have been one of the most subtle and solvent thinkers of the Middle Ages; pursued by the greatest theologians, crushed by two Councils, and remaining, in the popular fancy, as a sort of Friar Bacon, a forerunner of the wizard Faustus; a man whom Bernard of Clairvaux called a thief of souls, a rapacious wolf, a Herod; a man who reveals himself a Pagan in his attempts to turn Plato into a Christian; a man who disputes about Faith in the teeth of Faith, and criticises the Law in the name of the Law; a man, most enormous of all, who sees nothing as symbol or emblem (_per speculum in aenigmate_), but dares to look all things in the face (_facie ad faciem omnia intuetur_). _Facie ad faciem omnia intuetur_, this, which is the acknowledged method of all modern, as it had been of all antique, thought, nay, of all modern, all antique, all healthy spiritual life--this was the most d.a.m.nable habit of Abelard; and, as the letters show, of Helose.

What shall we think, in consequence, of the intellectual and moral sterility of the orthodox world of the eleventh century, when we find this heretical man, this rebellious woman, arguing incessantly about unrealities, crus.h.i.+ng out all human feeling, judging all questions of cause and effect, settling all relations of life, with reference to a system of intricate symbolical riddles? These things are exceedingly difficult for a modern to realise; we feel as though we had penetrated into some Gulliver's world or kingdom of the Moon; for theology and its methods have been relegated, these many hundred years, to a sort of _Hortus inclusus_ where nothing human grows. These mediaeval men of science apply their scientific energies to mastering, collecting, comparing and generalising, not of any single fact of nature, but of the words of other theologians. The magnificent sense of intellectual duty, so evident in Abelard, and in a dozen monastic authors quoted by him, is applied solely to fantasticating over Scripture and its expositors, and diverting their every expression from its literal, honest, sane meaning. And indeed, are some of the high efforts of mediaeval genius, the calculations of Joachim and the Eternal Gospel, any better than the Book of Dreams and the Key to the Lottery? Most odious, perhaps, in this theology triumphant (sickening enough, in good sooth, even in the timid official theology of later days), is the loss of all sense of what's what, of fitness and decency, which interprets allegorically the grosser portions of Scripture, and, by a reverse process, lends to the soul the vilest functions of the body, and discusses virtue in the terms of fleshliness. No knowledge can come out of this straw-splitting _in vacuo_; and certainly no art out of this indecent pedant's symbolism: all things are turned to dusty, dirty lumber.

As with the intellectual, so also, in large degree, with the moral: a splendid will to do right is applied, in its turn, to phantoms.

Here again the letters of Abelard and Helose are extraordinarily instructive. The highest virtue, the all-including (how differently Dante feels, whatever he may say!), is _obedience_. Thus Abelard, having quoted from St. Augustine that all which is done for obedience'

sake is well done, proceeds very logically: "It is more advantageous for us to act rightly than to do good.... We should think not so much of the action itself, as of the manner in which it is performed."

Do not imagine that this care for the motive and contempt of the action arises from an estimate of the importance of a man's sum-total of tendencies, contrasted with his single, perhaps unintentional, acts; still less that the advantage thus referred to has anything to do with other men's happiness. The advantage is merely to the individual soul, or in a cruder, truer view, to the individual combustible body to which that soul shall be eternally reunited hereafter. And the spirit which makes virtue alone virtuous is the spirit of obedience: obedience theoretically to a G.o.d, but practically to a father of the Church, a Council, an abbot or abbess. In this manner right-doing is emptied of all rational significance, becomes dependent upon what itself, having no human, practical reason, is mere arbitrary command. Chast.i.ty, for instance, which is, together with mansuetude, the especial Christian virtue, becomes in this fas.h.i.+on that mere guarding of virginity which, for some occult reason, is highly prized in Heaven; as to clean living being indispensable for bearable human relations, which even the unascetic ancients recognised so clearly, there is never an inkling of that. Whence, indeed, such persons as do not _go in for_ professionally pleasing the divinity, who are neither priests, monks, nor nuns, need not stickle about it; and the secular literature of the Middle Ages, with its Launcelots, Tristrams, Flamencas, and all its German and Provencal lyrists, becomes the glorification of illicit love. Indeed, in the letters before us, Abelard regrets his former misconduct only with reference to religious standards: as a layman he was perfectly free to seduce Helose; the scandal, the horrible sin, was not the seduction, but the profanation by married love of the dress of a nun, the sanctuary of the virgin. So it is with the renunciation of all the world's pleasures and interests. The ascetic sacrifice of inclination, which the stoics had conceived as resistance to the tyrant without and the tyrant within, as a method for serene and independent life and death, this ascetic renunciation becomes, in this arid theological world, the mere giving up to please a jealous G.o.d of all that is not He. Abelard's regulations for the nuns, which he gives as rules of perfection (save in the matter of that necessary half sin, marriage) to devout lay folk, come after all to this: give human nature enough to keep it going, so that it may be able to sacrifice everything else to the jealousy of the G.o.dhead. Eating, clothing oneself, was.h.i.+ng (though, by the way, there is no mention of this save for the sick), nay, speaking and thinking, are merely instrumental to the contemplation of G.o.d; any more than suffices for this is sinful. On this point Abelard quotes, with stolidest approval, one of the most heart-rending of anecdotes. A certain monk being asked why he had fled humankind, answered, on account of his great love for it, and the impossibility of loving G.o.d and it at the same time.

Think upon that. Think on the wasted treasure of loving-kindness of which that monk and the thousands he represents cheated his fellow-men.

O love of human creatures, of man for woman, parents and children, of brethren, love of friends; fuel and food, which keeps the soul alive, balm curing its wounds, or, if they be incurable, helps the poor dying thing to die at last in peace--this was those early saints' notion of thee!

To refuse thus to love is to refuse not merely the highest usefulness, but to refuse also the best kind of justice. Here again, nay, here more than ever, we may learn from those wonderful letters. They const.i.tute, indeed, a doc.u.ment of the human soul to which, in my recollection, one other only, Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, can be compared. But in these letters,--hers of grief, humiliation, hopelessness, making her malign her n.o.ble self; and his, bitter, self-righteous, crammed with theological moralisings--we see not merely the dual drama of two ill-a.s.sorted creatures, but the much more terrible tragedy, superadded by the presence, looming, impa.s.sive, as of Cypris in Euripides' Hippolytus, of a third all-powerful and superhuman ent.i.ty: the spirit of monasticism.

The unequal misery, the martyrdom of Helose arises herefrom, that she rebels against this _Deus ex machina_; that this nun of the eleventh century is a strong warm-hearted modern woman, fit for Browning. While Abelard is her whole life, the intimate companion of her highest thoughts, she is only a toy to him, and a toy which his theologian's pride, his monkish self-debas.e.m.e.nt, makes him afraid and ashamed of. Abelard has been for her, and ever remains, something like Brahma to Goethe's Bayadere; her love, her love above all for his intrepid intellect, has raised him to a sacredness so great, that his whim, his fame, his peace, his very petulance can be refused nothing; and that, on the other hand, any concession taken from him seems positive sacrilege. Hence her refusal of marriage, her answer, "that she would be prouder as his mistress--the Latin word is harlot--than as the wife of Caesar." Fifty years later, in the kind, pa.s.sionate, poetical days of St. Francis, Helose might have given this loving fervour to Christ, and been a happy, if a deluded, woman; but in those frigid monkish days, there was no one for her to love, save this frigid monkish Abelard. As it is, therefore, she loves Christ and G.o.d in obedience to Abelard; she pa.s.sionately cons the fathers, the Scriptures, merely because, so to speak, the hand of Abelard has lain on the page, the eyes of Abelard have followed the characters; and finally, after all her vain entreaties for (she scarce knows what!) love, sympathy, one personal word, she feeds her starving heart on the only answer to her supplications--the dialectic exercises, metaphysical treatises, and theological sermons (containing even the forms applicable only to a congregation) which he doles out to her. Thankful for anything which comes _from_ him, however little it comes _to_ her.

How different with Abelard! Despite occasional atrocious misery and unparalleled temporal misfortunes (which on the whole act upon him as tonics), this great metaphysician is well suited to his times, and spiritually thrives in their exhausted, chill atmosphere. The public rumour (which Helose hurls at him in a fit of broken-hearted rage), that his pa.s.sion for her had been but a pa.s.sing folly of the flesh, he never denies, but, on the contrary, reiterates perpetually for her spiritual improvement; let her understand clearly from what inexpressible degradation G.o.d in His mercy has saved them, at least saved him; let her realise that he wanted only carnal indulgence, and would have got it, if need be, through threats and blows. He recognises, in his past, only a feeling which, now it is over, fills his ascetic mind with nothing but disgust and burning shame, and hence he tries, by degrading it still more, by cynically raking up all imaginable filth, to separate that past from his present. So far, were only he himself concerned, one would sympathise, though contemptuously, with this agonised reaction of a proud, perhaps a vain, _man_ of mere intellect.

But the atrocious thing is, that he treats her as a loathsome relic of this past dishonour; and answers her prayer (after twelve years'

silence!) for a word of loving-kindness by elaborate denunciations of their former love, and reiterated jubilations that _he_, at least, has long been purged thereof; not unmixed with sharp admonishment that she had better not try to infect his soul afresh, but set about, if needful, cleansing her own. Now it so happens that what he would cure her of is incurable, being, in fact, eternal, divine--simple human love. So, to his pious and cynical admonitions she answers with strange inconsistency.

Long brooding over his taunts will sometimes make her, to whom he is always the divinity, actually believe, despite her reiteration, that she had sinned out of obedience to him, that she really is a polluted creature, guilty of the unutterable crime of contaminating a man of G.o.d, nay, a G.o.d himself. And then, unable to silence affection, she cries out in agony at the perversity of her nature, incapable even of hating sincerely its sinfulness; for would she not do it again, is she not the same Helose who would have left the very altar, the very communion with Christ, at Abelard's word? At other times she is pious, resigned, almost serene; for is that not Abelard's wish? a careful mother to her nuns.

But when, encouraged by her docility and blind to her undying love, Abelard believes that he has succeeded in quieting her down, and rewards her piety by some rhetorical phrase of Monkish eulogy, she suddenly turns round, a terrible tragic figure. She repudiates the supposed purity and piety, blazons out her wickedness and hypocrisy, and cries out, partly with the horror of the sacrilegious nun, mainly with the pride of the faithful wife, that it is not G.o.d she loves but Abelard.

After the most violent of these outbreaks there is a dead silence. One guesses that some terrible message has come, warning her that unless she promised that she would never write to Abelard save as the Abbess of the Paraclete to the monk of Cluny, not a word from him shall ever come; and that, in order to keep this last miserable comfort, she has bitten out that truth-speaking tongue of hers. For after this there are only questions on theological points and on the regulation of nunneries; and Abelard becomes as liberal of words as he used to be chary, as full of encouragement as he once was of insult, now that he feels comfortably certain that Helose has changed from a mistress to a penitent, and that in her also there is an end at last of all that sinful folly of love.

And thus, upon Helose pacified, numbed, dead of soul, among her praying and scrubbing and cooking and linen-mending nuns; and Abelard rea.s.sured, serene, spiritually proud once more among the raging controversies, the ecclesiastical persecutions in which his soul prospered, the volume closes; the curtain falls upon one of the most terrible tragedies of the heart, as poignant after seven hundred years as in those early Middle Ages, before St. Francis claimed sun and swallows as brethren, and the baby Christ was given to hold to St. Anthony of Padua.

III