Part 8 (1/2)
After this acquisition the boy became ambitious for still more finery, and was indulged in an elaborate costume that need not be described.
Such white linen, such a splendid blue coat, all covered with b.u.t.tons, gilded ones in double rows down the back, around the collar, and in front of silver. About the shoulders little bells were hung, that rang merrily when he sprang in the _reie_. Ah, very love-lorn were the glances cast on him by women and girls at the dance.
At last he is fully equipped by the love and sacrifice of his family, and they are happy in his elegance, and contented with themselves because the self-willed and capricious boy is pleased; when suddenly the simple household is thrown into grief and anxiety by his announcement that he is going to leave home. He must have a horse--there was none on the farm--to complete his outfit as a gentleman, and then he will ride away to some court and seek his fortune. In vain they remonstrate.
”'My dear father, help me on. My mother and sister have helped me so that I shall love them all my life.'
”His father was troubled to hear that he was resolved to go, but he said to him: 'I'll give you a fast horse for your outfit, good at hedges and ditches, for you to have there at court. I'll buy him for you willingly, if I can find one for sale. But, my dear son, now give up going to court. The ways there are hard for those who have not been used to them from the time they were children. My dear son, now drive team for me, or if you'd rather, hold the plough, and I'll drive for you, and let us till the farm, so you'll come to your grave full of honors like me; at least I hope to, for I surely am honest and loyal, and every year I pay my t.i.thes. I have lived my life without hate and without envy.'
”But the son replied: 'My dear father, keep quiet and stop talking; there's only one way about it, I'm going to find out how things smack there at court. Your sacks sha'n't load my back any longer. I won't load any more manure on your wagon, and G.o.d hate me if I ever yoke oxen for you again, and sow your oats. That's not the thing for my long yellow hair and my curly locks, and my close-fitting coat, and my fine hood, and the silk doves the women worked on it. I won't help you farm any longer.'
”'Dear son, stay with me. I am certain that farmer Ruoprecht will give you his daughter, with lots of sheep and swine, and ten cattle, old and young. At court you'll be hungry, you'll have to lie hard, and give up all comforts. Now take my advice, and it will be to your interests and credit. It very seldom happens that a man gets along well who rebels against his own station. Your station is the plough. My son, I swear to you that the genuine court-people will make fun of you, my dear child. Do as I say, and give it up.'
”'Father, if I only have a horse I shall get on as well in the court ways as those who were born there. Any one who saw that hood on my head would swear a thousand oaths that I never worked for you, or drove a plough through a furrow.
Whenever I put on the clothes my mother and my sister gave me yesterday, I sha'n't look much as if I ever took a flail to thresh wheat on the barn floor, or as if I ever drove stakes.
When I get my legs and my feet in the hose and cordovan boots, n.o.body'll know that I ever made fence for you or any one else. Let me have a horse, and farmer Ruoprecht may go without me for a son-in-law. I'll not give up my future for a wife.'”
The father goes on pleading with the boy to take advice and keep out of the disorderly life he is likely to get into about a court. By the silent a.s.sumption that his new master and his people will pillage from the peasantry, we get a suggestion of the lawlessness of the country--which had grown worse during the long absenteeism of Frederic II. But if the peasants catch you, he tells his son with energy, you will fare much worse than one of the gentlemen would. They will take the quickest revenge, and think that they are doing G.o.d service when they find one of their own kind stealing.
But the son only goes on to repeat that he will leave the farm. He talks just as an ambitious country fellow will talk to-day about the slow life and small profits. He becomes bolder and more insolent. If it were not for that wretched horse he would be riding with the rest across fields and dragging peasants through the hedges; the cattle would be lowing as he drove them off. He says he can endure poverty no longer;--raising a colt or an ox for three years, and then selling them for just nothing.
So his father traded a large piece of homespun, four good cows, two oxen, three steers, and four bushels of wheat,--all worth about ten pounds,--for a horse that could not have been sold for three (”alas for the wasted seven!”), and the young man put on his finery, tossed his head, and, looking around, jauntily declared that he could ”bite through a stone, or eat iron, he felt so fierce.” If he could catch the Emperor or the Duke, there would be some money coming in. ”'Father, you could manage a Saxon easier than me.'”
When he calls upon his father to release him from the family control, the latter a.s.sents, though with all his old reluctance. Indeed he cannot let him go without one more appeal:
”'I give you your liberty, my son. But take care that no one yonder hurts your hood and its silk doves, or viciously tears your long yellow hair. And I am afraid that at the end you will be following a staff, or some little boy will be leading you.'”
Then once more, after a pause, comes the abrupt:
”'My son, my own dear boy, give up going. You shall live on what I live, and on what your mother gives you. Drink water, my dear son, before you steal to buy wine. Austrian pie, any one, fool or wise man, will tell you, is food fit for gentlemen. Eat that, dear child, instead of giving an ox you have stolen to some inn-keeper for a chicken. Your mother can cook good broth; eat that, instead of giving a stolen horse for a goose. My son, mix rye with oats sooner than eat fish in a dishonored life. If you will not obey me, go. But though you win wealth and great honors, never will I share them with you. And misfortune--have that alone too.'
”'You drink water, father, but I'll drink wine. Eat your mush, but I'll eat what they call frica.s.seed chicken there and white wheat bread; oats will do for you. They say at Rome that a child takes after his G.o.dfather, and mine was a knight. Thank G.o.d for giving me such high and n.o.ble ideas.'”
But the old farmer replied that he liked much better a man who did right and remained constant to it.
”Even though his birth might be rather humble, he would please the world better than a king's son without virtue and honor. An honest man of lowly rank, and a n.o.bleman who was not courteous and honorable,--let the two come to a land where neither is known, and the child of lowly birth will outrank the high-born. My son, if you will be n.o.ble, on my word I counsel you, do n.o.ble deeds. Good life is a crown above all n.o.bility.”
There is the old thought, so common in literature from ancient authors down to the poet of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, and especially a favorite with writers of the middle age. Possibly some of them caught it from Boethius, who expressed it more than once in the testament of wise and generous character that he left to the world from his confinement at Pavia, and that proved so singularly congenial to the mediaeval mind; but we need certainly not require the aid of origins to account for its frequency. Aristocratic as many phases of the times were, there were a number of important evening influences, conspicuously two: the church, in whose monastery cloisters the rich and poor met together as brothers of one impartial discipline, and from whose ranks members of low birth might rise to be the peers of dukes; and the orders of chivalry, which received approved squires from the middle cla.s.s. Thus, in addition to aristocracy of birth, there was a conditional gentility to which those who had the claim of merit might aspire. But though the thought that desert, and not descent, is the test for n.o.bility, is so obvious in the days when position carried with it so strong a connotation of power, and when the upper strata of society bore down so hard and haughtily upon the lower, we always feel satisfaction in coming upon a trim statement of the fine old commonplace whose best mediaeval expression we can quote from a poet of our own language:
”Look, who that is moost vertuous alway, Pryvee and apert, and moost entendeth ay To do the gentil dedes that he kan, Taak hym for the grettest gentil man.”
”'Alas, that your mother bore you!'” the farmer exclaimed, when the boy's only answer to his appeal was to declare his hair and hood better fitted for a dance than for the plough or the harrow. ”'Thou wilt leave the best and do the worst'”; and he goes on to contrast the man who lives against G.o.d and the good of others, followed by every one's curses, with the man who helps the world along, trying night and day to do good by his life, and thereby honors G.o.d. This one, wherever he may turn, has the love of G.o.d and all the world.
”'Dear son,' he says, 'that man you might be, if you would yield to me. Till with the plough, and plenty of people will be the better for your life, poor and rich; nay, even wolf and eagle, and everything that lives on earth. Many a woman must be made more beautiful through the farmer, many a king must be crowned through the produce of the farm. Indeed, there is no one so n.o.ble that his pride would not be a very small thing, except for the farmer.'”
How natural all this sounds,--agriculture the basis of society, tillage of the soil alike useful and honorable. With what quiet manliness this old German talks of the dignity of labor, with no touch of the modern arrogance and discontent with the existing social condition. He will keep to his rank in life, and be loyal to his station, yet, though he looks up with a simple-hearted interest and wonder to the great world above him, he reflects as he follows his plough that without him that great world's pride ”would be a very small thing.” But there is a quality here that is still finer: the undercurrent perception of ”the gospel of service.” It is not only that honesty is the best policy, though the peasant is shrewd, and appreciates the practical side too; his conversation with the boy breathes the best nineteenth-century spirit of the duty of making one's life valuable to others. That sentence about working night and day to be useful, and thereby honoring G.o.d, is no commonplace for our century, to say nothing of the thirteenth. There is something pretty, too, in the touch of sympathy with the animal world; in some way, he feels that even the birds and beasts must be better off for a good farmer.
These times seem often savage in their cruelties and recklessness of giving pain, but they have a gentle side as well, as may be seen in the tales cited by Montalembert of friendly relations between monks and wild beasts, and in examples collected by Uhland in his essay on the old German animal literature. It is pleasant in connection with such barbarities as we shall presently be reminded of in this very poem to recall the myth versified by Longfellow, of the great minnesinger's legacy to the monastery, conditioned on the brethren's every day placing grain and water for the birds upon his grave; and more than one authentic story is told like that of the Abbot of Hirsan, who, when snow was deep in winter, would take oats from his barn to feed the birds.
After the young Helmbrecht has begged G.o.d to release him soon from his father's preaching,--”if you only had been a real preacher you might have got up a whole army with your sermons for a crusade,”--and has explained that instead of keeping on ploughing, he is resolved to have white hands, and no longer need to feel mortified whenever he holds ladies' hands at a dance, his father resorts to his last resource--an appeal to superst.i.tion, that he has been keeping in reserve. He tells him what he has been dreaming--three dreams that he interprets as ominous of the loss of sight, feet, and arms, and worst of all, a final dream of one of those sights so common for many centuries before and after, but made no less dreadful by familiarity.
”'You were hanging on a tree. Your feet were a fathom from the ground. Above your head on a bough sat a raven, by its side a crow. Your hair was all tangled. On the right hand the raven combed your head for you, on the left the crow.'”