Part 3 (1/2)
A better explanation may be found, I believe, in modern refinement and ethical sensitiveness.
Side by side with the new appreciation of nature may be observed a steady growth in sensibility. Our modern moods of inward contemplation--we are famous for them--our modern zeal for humanity down to its lowest grades; nay, even our tenderness for the brutes, have been distinguis.h.i.+ng marks of the poet guides under whom we have learned to appreciate our new physical symbolisms of human emotion. Modern melancholy, as well, a melancholy more subtle and thoughtful, more poetical too, than that of mediaevalism, has touched men with its pensive fascination. Philosophical pantheism such as Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, feels deity in nature; the new Christianity incarnates divinity in universal man. Man is more than he used to be, his moods are deeper, his thought freer. He seeks more ardently than of old, because with less constraint, the mystery in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He no longer quails before the majesty and awe of its forever elusive presence. For he knows that though he cannot find it, it enfolds him with love and beauty, it cries back to his pa.s.sion and pain in winter and storm; from the solemn mountains it reminds him of himself, an unconquerable partner of its own eternity.
[Decoration]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _Lit. Fam._, iv., 1.
[2] Since this pa.s.sage was written, I have met with the following extract from a letter of Tennyson's, dated in 1874, though with no direct reference to the experience being a.s.sociated with nature: ”All at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself has seemed to dissolve and to fade away into boundless being; and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were), seeming no extinction, but the only true life.”
[3] Any student of Dante, who recalls his lovely early sonnet, _Guido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io_, and compares it with Sh.e.l.ley's almost parallel conception of lovers sailing away in indivisible companions.h.i.+p, in the latter part of _Epipsychidion_, will obtain an excellent ill.u.s.tration of this same difference of feeling about the natural setting for a happy love. In Dante the sentiment is vague, and only what is peaceful, while Sh.e.l.ley's ideal haunt of lovers admits owls and bats with the ring-dove, an ”old cavern h.o.a.r” left unadorned, mossy mountains, and quivering waves.
[4] We recall his great countryman's modern cry: ”Wohin es geht, wer weiss es? Erinnert er sich doch kaum, woher er kam.”
[Decoration]
ULRICH VON LIECHTENSTEIN.
THE MEMOIRS OF AN OLD GERMAN GALLANT.
Any one who has read Freytag's excellent studies of German social life will recall a curious ill.u.s.tration in his first volume of the lawless violence of thirteenth-century knighthood, in the imprisonment of Ulrich von Liechtenstein by his liegeman Pilgerin. The account not only proves the author's point, but it goes on to suggest a good deal besides. For the victim's unsophisticated and plaintive manner under his misfortune, the fas.h.i.+on in which he relates what he suffered, his allusions to his own life and character, and most of all to the consolations of his love, are all stimulating to one's curiosity about the writer. When we go to the mediaeval shelves of a German library we find this curiosity satisfied in a long poem by the unfortunate Ulrich, and immediately we are in that chivalric age which wins most of its romantic l.u.s.tre from its devotion to womanhood.
If our guesses at a truth beneath the stories of widowed ladies rescued from bandits of the forest and recreant knights, or of lovely ladies rescued from worse than death by the capture of castles through the prowess of generous champions--stories which every one knows and incredulously likes--send us to a study of the times when they were composed, we find that the age, when stripped of romantic embellishments, in its actual life felt a sentiment for women unequalled by earlier times. We wonder what caused it. Can it have been the increase in the culture of the Virgin, that beautiful and beneficent phase of mediaeval religion? In its larger development, this appears rather the parallel expression of some common influence, these adorations of the divine and human conceptions of woman seeming to be mutually impulsive, and drawn alike from some undetermined tendency of social and spiritual refinement. Or was it the Crusades? For a German essayist has suggested that we may count this increase of sentimentalism among their many influences upon western Europe; the beauty of the women and the more luxurious habits of the East, its more effeminate emotionalism, finding impressionable subjects in the hearts of those stranger knights lying, wakeful for home, beneath southern stars.
Perhaps the conjecture is equally reasonable that the influence came from French poets who, as they travelled with the early Christian armies, caught such suggestions from s.n.a.t.c.hes of oriental poetry. Yet it seems more natural to regard the growth of knightly sentiment toward ladies as the more delicate manifestation of a spontaneous increase of social personality, which was stimulated by that general motion in mind and heart which we observe in the progress of chivalric and crusadal life, and based, as we must not forget, upon that Teutonic character, whose ancient deference to woman is recorded by Tacitus side by side with his account of knighting youthful soldiers with spear and s.h.i.+eld.
But, to waive the question of its origin, we find its main expression in the old society, in that protracted and conventional wooing which, we should remember, was not usually directed toward marriage. As gentlemen grew hyperbolical and fantastic in their professions of regard and devotion, feminine coquettishness and love of admiration naturally became fastidious and exacting. Ladies grew arbitrary and capricious, and began to demand substantial proofs of their lovers' concern for them. It became a trait of elegant culture for a lady to pose as inexorable, while still retaining her control over the wooer; while he, complaisant to the sentimental fas.h.i.+on, sighed in a cheerful melancholy, obeyed, adored, and waited. The mistress set tasks, often no trifles, which the loyal subject must perform--hard feats of arms, long and perilous journeys, abnegations of pride or comfort. When these were accomplished, he sometimes returned to receive a new test, involving a continued delay of his reward. These mediaeval ladies were as pitiless as the mystic spiritual dictatress of Browning's _Numpholeptos_, to their devotees:
”Seeking love At end of toil, and finding calm above Their pa.s.sion, the old statuesque regard.”
In the fourteenth century something of this romantic tyranny survived.
We find Chaucer, for instance, in one of his early poems, mentioning in praise of his heroine that she did not impose dangerous expeditions to distant countries, or extravagant exploits upon her lover:
”And saye, 'Sir, be now ryght ware That I may of you here seyn Wors.h.i.+ppe, or that ye come agayn.'”
Extended probations, courts.h.i.+ps long enough to satisfy Ruskin, were an established convention. Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the seventh book of _Parzival_, represents Obie as indignantly telling her royal lover, who has asked her to marry him after what seems to him a reasonable love-making, that if he had spent his days for five years, in hard service, under full armor, with distinction, and she had then said ”Yes”
to his desire, she would be yielding too soon.
Jane Austen, in the novel to which Trollope gave the palm of English fiction before _Henry Esmond_, has expressed in Mr. Collins's address to Elizabeth exactly the notion of the significance in a rejection, held by well-bred gentlemen six centuries earlier:
”'I am not now to learn,' replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, 'that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favor; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.'”
But these exercises, as was suggested, were not usually directed toward the altar. A characteristic of the age is the relation, less or more sentimental, between a married knight and a lady not his wife; a relation rather expected of the former, and countenanced in the latter.
This peculiar dual system of domestic and knightly love may be ascribed to various influences, such as the prosaic influence of early and dowered marriages, subject to parental arrangement, or the feudal life which for considerable periods kept gentlemen away from their own homes in residence in the larger castles, or the idleness of such a society, or again the popularity of love-lyrics and romance-recitals, which would tend to sentimentalize their audience. At any rate, it came to be a fas.h.i.+onable idea that the highest love was independent of marriage, and the most poetically inclined,--the troubadours and the minnesingers--were famous for their impa.s.sioned and submissive service of married ladies. It is from these poets' accounts of their own love-trials that we learn most about this phase of mediaevalism, and in their contented sufferings we see once more that the joy of all romantic love is in the lover.
Although there is danger of generalizing too widely from literary indications, we may believe that chivalric society was appreciably marked by formal amatory disciplines. Was it all for nothing these ceremonial disciplines? Can it be that these Don Quixote prototypes, who trifled away their frivolous days in lady-wors.h.i.+p so trivial, did anything to help the Prince to take Cinderella from the ashes? The ashes, then the fairy coach; first the drudge, then the sentimental plaything, then at last the friend. In those days, as perhaps always, the lover objectified himself in his love, to the extent of finding in her his own _ideal feminine_. The very fact that this self, which he probably called into conscious life only as he created it in another, represented the most refined side of his thought, as is shown in the old poets' recurrent epithets of ”constant, chaste, good,” etc., made the devotion a refining and dignifying experience, especially for the days when men and women had less in common than they have now. These lady-services, where the lover often was denied intimacy for a considerable time, kept up the illusion which the devotee himself may have half felt was sentimental and artificial. We may reply to little Peterkin that some good did come of it at last, even for the more commonplace of these servants of abstract womanhood. Even if the ”visionary gleam” left no permanent illumination, the men were better for seeing it brightening through their darkness now and then. At its best, lady-loving gave the mediaeval knights consideration for women and a measure of gentleness. If it only stimulated some to fight hard, they would have fought anyway, and the motive was a shade less brutal than a directly selfish one.
But such an eccentric social idea, especially when the poetic exhilaration of its earlier hours has pa.s.sed by, was sure to bring out extravagant sentimentalists, whose romantic sensibility with no check from practical judgment, ran wild steeplechases of nonsense. Such, for example, was the Provencal poet, Peter Vidal, one of the most famous troubadours, who carried his romantic infatuations so far that he became crack-brained. The name of one of his ladies was Lupa, Mistress Wolf; and if he had contented himself with a.s.suming a wolfish device for his coat-of-arms, as he did, and having himself called Mr. Wolf, he would have done nothing very peculiar, for that age. But it occurred to him that it would be a graceful symbol to wear a wolf's skin, and after he had procured one which quite covered him, he got down on all-fours, and trotted through the street; and all went charmingly until one day, while he was exhibiting himself in this fas.h.i.+on about his lady's estate, a pack of dogs was deceived by the metaphor, and the allegorical lover was badly bitten before rescue arrived.