Part 4 (1/2)
When they reach their lodging-place for the night, he wishes to a.s.sist the only one in dismounting, but she is not sufficiently flattered by his attentions to accept them; she says that he is sick and useless, and not strong enough to help her down. The attending gentlemen laugh merrily at that, and the ever sweet, constant, good, and so forth, as she slides from her horse, catches hold of Ulrich's hair, without any one's noticing it (however that can have been done), and pulls a lock out by the roots. ”Take this for being afraid,” she whispers; ”I have been deceived by other accounts of you.” Reproaching himself, and wis.h.i.+ng G.o.d to take his life, he stood gawkily where she left him, absorbed in remorse for his awkwardness, until a knight admonished him to step aside and allow the ladies to go by to their rooms. Whereupon he rode off to his inn, and swore that he was ill.
As he tossed restlessly through the night, he talked with himself as usual, lamenting his birth, and a.s.suring himself that should he live a thousand years he could never again be happy. ”Not to speak one word to her! My worthlessness has lost my lady.” But in the morning he rode up to her on the street. No silence this time: ”Thy grace, gracious lady!
Graciously be gracious to me. Thou art my joy's abiding place, the festival of my joys.” Like many shy people, Ulrich talked fluently enough when he was once started, and he was only in the midst of his protestations when the lady interrupted him. ”Hush, you are too young; ride on before me. Talking may hurt you, it never can help you. It would be amiss for others to hear what you are saying. Leave me in peace; you grow troublesome.” Then she beckoned to another knight, and directed that she should never again be attended by less than two gentlemen.
It was in the book of lady-service that no repulse was a discouragement.
”This morning,” says the heroine in Bret Harte's parody of _Jane Eyre_, ”this morning he flung his boot at me! Now I know he loves me.” Ulrich rode off, thinking that he had met with good success in telling her a part of his love, before the interruption.
Another summer pa.s.sed in tourneying, and during another winter he tried to amuse himself by making poetry for his lady. This time he sent her a more pretentious tribute, his first ”Buchlein,” a poem of some four hundred lines. Like most of its kind, it is formal, sentimentally prolix, and supplicatory, yet not without a certain pleasant interest.
He begs her from the wealth of her loveliness to grant him some trifling favor which she never can miss:
What is worse the bloomy heath, If a few flowers for the sake Of a garland some one break?
He wishes it were himself that the messenger is about to deliver to her:
Little book, I fain would be, When thou comest, changed to thee.
When her fair white hand receives Thine a.s.semblement of leaves, And her glances, shyly playing, Thee so happy are surveying.
And her red mouth comes close by, I would steal a kiss, or die.
But the unsatisfactory ma.n.u.scripts were returned at once. The lady told the bearer that she recognized the merit of the poetry, but she would have nothing to do with it. Like many poets of those days when monks and ladies const.i.tuted the educated cla.s.ses, like his predecessor, the great master of high mediaeval romance, Ulrich could neither read nor write, and for such delicate personal affairs as correspondence with his lady he depended upon his confidential clerk. This confidant of his pa.s.sion was absent when the ”Buchlein” came back, but the eager eyes of the poet looked through the pages over which they had evidently wandered before he dismissed his labors to their fate, repeating the lines from memory as he looked over the characters which should interpret his loving patience to the lady who would not let him speak it to her; and as he looked, he detected an addition to what he had sent, an appendix of ten lines. The slighted letter found a home in his bosom, and for ten days he awaited his secretary's return. His happy hopes--those ten days were so cheerful. But when the little response was at last interpreted, away with hopes and cheerfulness. To make plainness trebly plain, his cruel correspondent had copied out three times the sentiment: ”Whoever desires what he should not, has refused himself.”
Summer again, and the lover has diversion in the sports of chivalry. Any one interested in the details of mediaeval tournaments will find in Ulrich's narrative a valuable and lively record of the tourney held at Friesach in 1224. His sense for material splendor is well shown by his full accounts of the costuming and tent equipments. The trustworthiness of the minor points may be questioned when we recall that the _Frauendienst_ was composed more than thirty years later, but as a sketch of thirteenth-century chivalry, no doubt it is accurate. The heralds running hither and thither, and shouting as they arranged for the contests, with their cries to ”good gallant knights to risk honor, goods, and life for true women”; the squires crowding the ways, loud noise of drums, flute-playing, blowing of horns, great trumpeting,--we have the old picture, made vivid in English by Chaucer in the _Knight's Tale_, and by Tennyson.
Ulrich rode in disguise, prompted by the sentimentalist's self-consciousness, always delighted in attracting attention and making himself talked of. According to his own account, he did good hearty tourneying, breaking ten spears with one antagonist, seven with another, five with a third, six with a fourth, in a single day. The meeting continued for ten days, and Ulrich grows prolix in his particulars, though he is modest enough about his own exploits, p.r.o.nouncing himself neither the best nor the worst of the partic.i.p.ants.
The accidents of jousting, through which many were left at Friesach with broken limbs and other injuries, and the misfortunes which compelled others to have recourse to the Jews for loans, did not disturb the musical contestant. At the end he rode cheerfully off to his cousin with another song for the same inattentive ear. She promised to report, as she sent it, that no one in the great tourney had excelled him.
This lyric is the poem by which modern German students of their old literature have been best pleased, and we shall hardly dissent from Scherer's commendation. For it is both a typical minnesong, in its treatment of nature and love, and also fortunate in its union of sentiment, force, finish, and a ring of personal meaning. Omitting two of its stanzas, it goes as follows:
Now the little birds are singing In the wood their darling lay; In the meadow flowers are springing, Confident in sunny May.
So my heart's bright spirits seem Flowers her goodness doth embolden; For in her my life grows golden, As the poor man's in his dream.
Ah, her sweetness! Free from turning Is her true and constant heart; Till possession banish yearning, Let my dear hope not depart.
Only this her grace I'll pray: Wake me from my tears, and after Sighs let comfort come and laughter; Let my joy not slip away.
Blissful May, the whole world's anguish Finds in thee its single weal; Yet the pain whereof I languish, Thou, nor all the world, canst heal.
What least joy may ye impart, She so dear and good denied me?
In her comforts ever hide me, All my life her loving heart.
But elegant and tender as in the original these verses are, their object returned a slighting answer, and added that the messenger must not be sent again. People would come to have suspicions. Ulrich made another set of verses, and went off to another joust. There one of his fingers was seriously wounded, and in his anxiety to save it he offered a surgeon a thousand pounds for a cure. The treatment was unsuccessful, and, after showing a good deal of temper, he went to a new surgeon, on the way beguiling himself of his pain by composing another poem upon the old theme. But a shock was at hand; a friend divulged to him his closely kept secret. ”This lady [still unnamed to us] is the May-time of your heart.” What though this friend believed that the lady cared for him?
”My head sank down, my heart sighed, my mouth was dumb,” in terror lest it might be through his fault that the object of his devotion had been discovered. For secrecy was the first of a chivalric lover's virtues, even about the object of his pa.s.sion. Yet the pain was not without compensation, inasmuch as this gentleman, who declared that he had already kept the secret for two years and a half, volunteered to make another appeal. So off to the home of the inexorable went anew the story of unflinching devotion, the loss of a finger in a tournament for her glory not unmentioned. Ulrich's cause was pleaded with fervor, and in winning style. The lover was praised and prayed for. The song he had sent was even sung, instead of being formally delivered. A faithful and versatile legate was this proxy wooer, but it was all to no purpose. The lady declared that she would grow old in entire ignorance of any love but her husband's. She warned the messenger that Ulrich would find himself in trouble if he should persist in annoying her with such sentimental folly; she would not receive such attentions from the highest-born--not even from a king.
The news saddened, but did not cast down. ”What if she refuses me?”
cried Ulrich; ”that shall not disturb me. If she hates me to-day, I will serve her so that later she shall like me. Were I to give up for a cold greeting, could a little word drive me away from my high hope, I should have no sound mind or manly mood. Whatever the true, sweet one does to me, for that I must be grateful.” But now another summer was over, and he diverted himself by a pilgrimage to Rome. After Easter he returned, on his way composing this sweetly conceived and rather pretty lyric:
Ah, see, the touch of spring Hath graced the wood with green; And see, o'er the wide plain Sweet flowers on every spray.
The birds in rapture sing; Such joy was never seen: Departed all their pain, Comfort has come with May.
May comforts all that lives, Except me, love-sick man; Love-stricken is my heart, This drives all joys away.