Part 9 (1/2)
[9]
”La pluye nous a debuez et lavez, Et le soleil dessechez et noirciz; Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez, Et arrachez la barbe et les sourcilz.”
[Decoration]
CHILDHOOD IN MEDIaeVAL LITERATURE.
When Homer described the pretty fright of Astyanax in his nurse's arms, amid the parting of Hector and Andromache; when Vergil made Damon recall the day when, as a little boy just able to reach up to the branches, he saw his mother and the child who was to be his fate gathering apples--the hyacinths of Theocritus were daintier--they struck two chords of feeling, one charming, the other deeper and richer, which have started vibrations whenever they have met a sympathetic reader ever since. Because we are susceptible to the poetry of childhood we are pleased to find that these ancient poets also cared for it. It adds a personal touch to our feeling for them. It gives us a thrill of the immortality of heart and its simplest, purest sentiment. There may be an element of the fict.i.tious in our feeling about childhood. Heaven may not be about our infancy, those ”sweet early days” may not have been ”as long as twenty days are now”; and they may not have been the types of innocence, simplicity, the loveliness of the race taken at first hand from nature, which we fancy them. But there is something beyond a fallacy in this sentiment; it is in our purer and more refined moods that we are sensitive to it. Like a whiff of spring smoke, or woodsy odors, a reminder of our early life will sometimes throw us into a revery which is more than recollection. No one can write well about children without sensibility to youthful emotion and some love for family life. Whoever looks back with genial wistfulness upon his own early days, and enjoys renewing them in the playthings of his fancy, can hardly be without a vein of quiet refinement. When an age listens with pleasure to such sketches, it is not barren of the homely affections, nor uniformly given over to restless and unlawful pa.s.sions. As one wanders through the poetry of the middle ages, one observes the frequency with which it mentions children.
These pa.s.sages, judged absolutely, may not be remarkable for insight or tenderness, but in those days all emotional subjects were treated crudely. Yet they are often interesting for themselves, and they show a fact which many seem to question that the sentiments of simple family life were felt by poets and people. So much has been written by critics upon the worse side of the society of chivalry, that it is well to recognize this other aspect of its affections. The public has frequently been a.s.sured that those days knew nothing of true family sentiment. How much truth there is in the statement that fas.h.i.+onable love disregarded marriage, has been shown in a preceding essay. But on _a priori_ grounds we should disbelieve that general society was permeated by artificial gallantry. Even were the testimony of lyrical lovers uniform, we must recollect how conventional all their love-poetry was; most poets composed on formal lines impersonally, in spite of their p.r.o.nouns. One of the troubadours, indeed, denied that this was possible when the husband of his theme challenged him, in the lonely place where he was hunting, by his liege truth to tell him whether he had a lady love.
”Sire,” he replied, ”how could I sing unless I loved?” But in most poems there was more business, or ambitious art, than nature. A large number of these poets impress us as having just as little emotional veracity in writing as had Cowley in _The Mistress_. Moreover, even if a school of poetry, not conventionalized, should treat romantic and sensational sentiment to the exclusion of domestic, it would prove nothing. What if cynical critics some centuries hence should give Mr. Coventry Patmore a place in their encyclopedias, simply on the ground that he was an exception to the nineteenth-century belief that love ended at the bridal altar? Possibly by that time love, poetry, and fiction may deal mainly with domestic emotions after marriage, and then our own romances will very likely appear strange.
From one point of view those centuries were too akin to undeveloped life to be prepared to represent it. Europe seven hundred years ago seems like a vast nursery abandoned by its governess. The people are like children of various ages and sizes, degrees of education, and innate sense of right and wrong. Children are impulsive, pa.s.sionate, selfish, brutally inconsiderate; they are sometimes religious too. We find apparently sporadic susceptibility to isolation and prayer. They cry at trifles, and while their cheeks are still wet, they are smiling. Bright and simple things please them; they are fickle and impatient; they love lively music; when they are tired playing, nothing pleases them like a story--they listen intently, credulously. When spring comes they can no more help running and dancing over the gra.s.s, than sunbeams on a brook.
The gentler sit in the meadow making posies, while the rougher are setting traps, and racing, and fighting: but sometimes the rough boys will come and play in the meadow, and be pleasant to the girls. All these traits of children apply to the mediaeval character, their barbarisms, their ethical inconsistencies, their delight in stories (no age has ever cared more for story telling), their love of play, their pa.s.sion for spring, and the rest.
Undoubtedly the popular impression gives the period too little joyousness. Mercurial childhood has capacity for sudden pleasures even when life goes ill, and life frequently went very well even then. But the mystery and grace of motherhood and dawning life are likely to appeal to a calmer and more retrospective age. The seriousness that takes pleasure in contemplating childhood is more serene and pensive than the usual moods of an era undeveloped emotionally. So it would not be a matter for surprise if the literary remains of those days had left us mainly incidental references to children.
Of such plain facts we have many, such as, for instance, that the little ones were entertained with pet dogs, birds, and squirrels (apparently never with cats), mice harnessed to a toy wagon, clay or wooden images of animals, and tiny vessels after kitchen models, toy men, women, and children, tops, and marbles; that they played blind man's buff, and many games attended with songs. As early as the interesting Latin poem called _Waltharius et Hiltgunde_, which at least in a popular version Walther von der Vogelweide liked, we find the hero appealing to Hagen, by the memory of the boyish games with which they had whiled away their childhood, and over which they never had quarrelled.
We obtain considerable information about customs of education also; such as the attention paid to languages (a girl in a French romance is said to have understood fourteen tongues), and Isolde knew French and Latin as well as Irish. Boys were sent off on their travels early, going especially to Paris. Weinhold's quotation from Hugo von Trimberg ill.u.s.trates the dangers that beset the pursuit of culture even then: ”Many boys go to Paris; they learn little and spend much. But yet no doubt they see Paris.”
When Sir Philip Sidney derided the contemporary drama's habit of carrying a play through a large part of the hero's lifetime, instead of restricting the action to a developed episode, he made a poor criticism, out of tune, as are other parts of his criticism, with the genius of Elizabethan poetry. But the pa.s.sage is interesting as a reminder of the relation to that great literature of the romances which runs back through the middle ages to the later Greek writings. Such narrations as the _Daphnis and Chloe_, and the _Aethiopica_, introduce their central characters while they are still children, and whether through transmitted influence or independently, the same course is pursued by the most important romance poems of mediaeval France and Germany. To this practice we owe pleasant domestic scenes of many a hero's early life, and sometimes, indeed, a narration of early joys and sorrows of his parents' love. The _Tristan_ of Gottfried von Stra.s.sburg, for example, begins well before the birth of its subject, with noteworthy romantic episodes. This brilliant poem's account of the early years of chivalry's typical fine gentleman ill.u.s.trates the admiration paid to intellectual training at a time when polite society in general was not well educated.
Tristan spent his first seven years under the care of his foster-mother, learning various lessons of good behavior; after that Rual li Foitenant provided a master, and sent him off to acquire foreign languages in their own lands, and ”book-learning” as well. The luxurious temper of his chronicler stops for a long sigh at the hards.h.i.+p of such training, through the years when joyousness is at its best. So it is, he exclaims in his studied style, with many youth; when life is in its first bloom and freedom, away they are constrained to go from its free blossom. For seven years this young prince was constantly kept busy with the exercises of arms and horsemans.h.i.+p, in addition to his formal studies; he also learned hunting, and all courtly arts, especially music. Then he was called home to be prepared for his political career. The education of children was a.s.sisted by not a few treatises on manners and morals, such as _Babees Books_, as the old English called them. They are usually manuals of etiquette, mediaeval prototypes of such modern works as _Don't_. Chaucer's Prioress had evidently studied the sections on table proprieties, and her gentility, which was so tender-hearted, might well have been developed under the admonishments of the ethical pa.s.sages which often accompanied them. For a tender age many of these precepts were depressing. One of the gravest and most mature of these works is called _Der Winsbeke_, with a sequel, _Die Winsbekin_, for girls, the advice of a twelfth-century Solomon, which moralizes certainly as well as most of its a.n.a.logues. This stanza, for instance, shows a homely dignity:
That bright candle mark, my son, While it burns, it wastes away; So from thee thy life doth run, (I say true) from day to day.
In thy memory let this dwell, And life here so rule, that then With thy soul it may be well.
What though wealth exalt thy name?
Only this shall follow thee-- A linen cloth to hide thy shame.
These gnomic writings, running into a developed didacticism, are ill.u.s.trated by the song of Walther von der Vogelweide on the restraint of eye, ear, and tongue. Whether this poet was the teacher of the young King Henry, as some have thought, or gained his experience in humbler ways, he evidently knew the trials of the pedagogue. ”Oh, you self-willed boy,” he cries, ”too small to be put to work in the field and too big to whip, have your own way and go to sleep.” As for flogging, this prince of the minnesingers took the side of the Matthew Feildes against the Boyers: ”No one can switch a child into education; to those whom you can bring up well, a word is as good as a blow.”
Apropos of the teacher's view, we also find the pupil's feeling for his teacher recorded in that little poem of the English school-boy, who was late in the morning, and explained to the master that his mother told him to stop and milk the ducks. The boy recounts the details of what follows, and afterwards, instead of taking up his interrupted studies, he words out a day-dream in which the master is turned into a hare, his books into hounds, and the boy goes hunting.
There is a grain of humor, too, at least for the modern reader, in a much more sentimental child-play of the minnesinger Hadlaub. Though he mainly echoes the love singers who wrote a hundred years before him, one of the first songs in the collection of his poems raises a hope of something more than the ordinary, though this only leads us on to disappointment through the rest of his fifty-odd pieces. There is something very natural about this picture of the lover catching sight of his disdainful fair one playing with a little child. ”She reached out her arms and caught it close to her, she took its face between her white hands, and pressed it to her lips and mouth and lovely cheek; ah, how deliciously she kissed it!” What did the child do? ”Just what I should have done; threw its arms around her, and was so happy.” When she let the little one go, the lover went after it and kissed it just where her lips had been, ”and how that went to my heart!” Poor fellow! ”I serve her since we both were children,” and this is the nearest apparently that he ever came to the seals of love.
But instead of delaying over estrays, pleasant sc.r.a.ps like those left us by Heinrich von Morungen, for instance, one of the few minnesingers for whom one really cares, we may pa.s.s on to three or four more detailed examples from the thirteenth century, of household love and sympathy with the poetry of childhood. But first I will translate a simple sesame for opening again the early gates. The poet is known as the Wild Alexander, but his mood was gentle and gracious when this revery of his boyhood came upon him:
There we children used to play, Thro' the meadows and away, Looking 'mid the gra.s.sy maze For the violets; those days Long ago Saw them grow; Now one sees the cattle graze.
I remember as we fared Thro' the blossoms, we compared Which the prettiest might be: We were little things, you see.
On the ground Wreaths we bound;-- So it goes, our youth and we.
Over stick and stone we went Till the sunny day was spent; Hunting strawberries each skirrs From the beeches to the firs, Till--h.e.l.lo, Children! Go Home, they cry--the foresters.
So he goes on to tell how their childhood took as a pleasure the hurts and stings that they received as they hunted for strawberries, and to recall the warnings against snakes that the herdsman sometimes shouted through the branches. Apart from its graceful manner, and the breezy freshness of its universal childhood, the poem's specific touches are unusual. ”From the beeches to the firs,” for instance, does not sound mediaeval aside from one's surprise that a German should have omitted the linden. We need not be as old as was Lamb in 1820, to look back with a touch of desire on the child, that other me, there in the background.
Perhaps there is the glamour of sentiment about that familiar a.s.sociation of childhood with purity and moral grace. Yet the feeling appeals to us as true beyond mere beauty, and many may read with responsiveness these lines, hitherto unprinted, by one on whose lips, just parted for their song, silence laid her finger:
”Could I answer love like thine, All earth to me were heaven anew; But were thy heart, dear child, as mine, What place for love between us two?
Bright things for tired eyes vainly s.h.i.+ne: A grief the pure heaven's simple blue.