Part 10 (1/2)
This love between boy and girl was attractive to the old narrative poets. The greatest of them all touched the soul of young romance when he said of Sigune and Schionatulander, ”Alas, they are still too young for such pain, yet 'tis the love of youth which lasts.” Wolfram gives us pretty touches of childhood as far back as the nursery; like that of a mother and her ladies playing over the new-born baby, or of children learning to stand by taking hold of chairs, and creeping over the floor to reach them, or of Sigune's care to take her box of dolls with her when she went away. ”Whoever saw this little girl thought her a glimpse of May among the dewy flowers.” As she grew older, too, he describes her, a.s.suming the airs of a young lady. ”When her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were rounding and her light wavy hair began to turn dark, she grew more proud and dignified, though always keeping her womanlike sweetness.” The story of her love with Schionatulander has delightful stanzas; their long love-pleading dialogue is much truer than most of the minnesingers' work in its restraint and in the girl's coy sweetness. She is an earlier Dorigen as she watches for the beloved who does not come, wasting many an evening at the window gazing over the fields, or climbing to the housetop to look. But what distinguishes the author of the _t.i.turel_ above his fellow-poets is his sentiment for something more than romance.
Children are dear to him, and the wife is dearer. His idea of love consists no more in Dante's platonic mysticism than in pa.s.sion and inconstancy. Without transcendentalism its dominant tone is spiritual.
Compare an earlier lover's cry in the loveliest of French romances: ”What is there in heaven for me? I will never go there without Nicolette, my sweet darling, whom I love so much. It is to h.e.l.l that fine gentlemen go and pretty, well-bred ladies who love.” Compare that Parisian type of feeling with this of Wolfram: ”Love between man and woman has its house on earth, and its pure guidance leads us to G.o.d and heaven. This love is everywhere save in h.e.l.l!” To such a poet we naturally turn for the deepest mediaeval note in the treatment of childhood, and we do not listen in vain.
”What a difference there is between women,” Wolfram exclaims. It seems to him the way of modern womanhood to be disloyal, worldly, selfish, like men: but in the days of which he writes in his chief poem there was a lady Herzeloide, to whom after her husband's death in the wars, the sun was a cloud, the world's joy lost, night and day alike, who for heavenly riches chose earthly poverty, and leaving her estates went with her retainers far into the unreclaimed forest to bring up her infant safe from the strife and wiles of men. This only heritage of her lost lord was the boy Parzival. She trusted that by hiding him away from all knowledge of the world, she might always keep him her own. She exacted an oath from her servants that they would never let him hear of knights and knighthood, and while they cleared farming land in the heart of the woods, she cared for the child. It was a desolate place, but she was not looking for meadows and flowers; she gave no thought to wreaths, whether red or yellow.[11]
The child grew into boyhood, and was indulged in making bows and arrows.
As he played in the woods, he shot some of the birds. But after he saw them dead, he remembered how they had sung, and he cried. Every morning he went to a stream to bathe. There was nothing to trouble him, except the singing of the birds over his head: but that was so sweet that his breast grew strained with feeling; and he ran to his mother in tears.
She asked what ailed him, but ”like children even now it may be,” he could not tell her. But she kept the riddle in her heart, and one day she found him gazing up at the trees listening to the birds, and she saw how his breast heaved as they sang. It seemed to her that she hated them, she did not know why. She wanted to stop their singing, and bade her farm hands snare and kill them. But the birds were too quick; most of them remained and kept on singing. The boy asked his mother what harm the birds did, and if the war upon them might not cease. She kissed his lips:
”Why am I opposing highest G.o.d? Shall the birds lose their happiness because of me?”
”Nay, mother, what is G.o.d?”
”My son, He is brighter than the day; He took upon himself the likeness of man. When trouble comes upon thee, pray to him: his faithfulness upholds the world. The Devil is darkness; turn thy thoughts from him, and from unbelief.”
This pa.s.sage is Wolfram's invention; the brilliant Gallic poet whose romance he followed could not have contrived it. This sympathy with nature belongs to our later era; it seems less strange to meet it in Keats, when the boy Apollo wanders out alone in the morning twilight:
”The nightingale had ceased, and a few stars Were lingering in the heavens, while the thrush Began calm-throated. Throughout all the isle There was no covert, no retired cave Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves.
Though scarcely heard in many a green recess, He listened and he wept, and his bright tears Went trickling down the golden bow he held.”
One recalls nothing in the two centuries which Wolfram touches that equals this picture of the mother watching her child's baptism with the sad and precious gift of soul, as he stands gazing upward in his forest trance, or listening to his dawning perplexities, or teaching him his first religious lesson, or jealous of the birds, because his dreamy love for them dimly warned her of a mysterious growing soul that would not remain within her simple call. Those lines in the _Princess_ of the faith in womankind and the trust in all things high, that come easy to the son of a good mother, certainly are appropriate to Parzival, whose faith held true and simple through his whole career as the foremost knight of chivalric legend, living for a spiritual ideal, unseduced by beauty and the ways of courts from loyalty to his first wedlock:
”True to the kindred points of heaven and home.”
The description of Parzival's meeting with the knights, his mistaking them in their bright armor for angels, and his eagerness to make his way to Arthur's court are narrated by Chrestien with his own excellent vivacity, and here Wolfram only follows.
The Welsh version of the story in the _Mabinogi_ of Peredur, though disappointing, contains a nave sketch of the boy's rustic attempt to imitate the knight's trappings. But for the full tenderness of his mother's parting as he goes out from home to the fierce world we must turn again to the German.[12]
She kisses him, and as he rides away ”runs a few steps after him” till he has galloped out of sight and then she closes forever the eyes whose light of motherhood shone like a star above the sea, over those tumultuous years.
All through these centuries there are poems to the Virgin, especially in Latin, which manifest similar sensibility to infancy and motherhood.
One of the most pleasing belongs to England, and is written in the commixture of Latin and the modern tongue, which occasionally produces quaintly pretty effects. The glorified Christ summons his mother, by the memory of their kisses when she calmed him in sweet song, to come and be crowned. ”Pulcra ut luna”--lovely as moonlight--”veni coronaberis.”
But perhaps the most delicate of all such sketches comes from an unexpected source. A young lawyer in the town of Todi, whose early life had combined pleasure with sufficient study to gain the doctorate, was turned aside from a prosperous public career by the tragical loss of his bride. Matthew Arnold has given a symbolism to the story of her death in the sonnet beginning:
”That son of Italy who tried to blow 'Ere Dante came, the trump of sacred song.”
The sorrow struck deep, even to the point of partial mania; the gay young man forsook the world and devoted years to seclusion and religious culture. Later in 1278, he entered the order of the Minorites, and ranks as one of their delirious enthusiasts, a mystic poet, a reckless satirist of evils in high places. His fanatic asceticism made him glory in bodily torments and the world's scorn. The nickname, Jacapone, he carried proudly, and even the harshness of Boniface VIII. could not quell his zest for martyrdom. We should scarcely look to him for sympathy with the sweet gaieties of the nursery, yet this little sketch of the Virgin's life with Christ, the child, came from the same hand that wrote the sorrows of the _Stabat Mater_.
Ah sweet, how sweet, the love within thy heart, When on thy breast the nursing infant lay: What gentle actions, sweetly loving play, Thine, with thy holy child apart.
When for a little while he sometimes slept, Thou eager to awake thy paradise, Soft, soft, so that he could not hear thee, crept, And laidest thy lips close to his eyes, Then, with the smile maternal calling, ”Nay, 'Twere naughty to sleep longer, wake, I say!”
The almost incoherent repet.i.tion of the word ”Love,” in one of his poems, is suggestive of the man; despair for human love led to his half-crazed absorption in the divine. Very sweetly sounds this sacred meditation's echo of his recollection of the nights of his own childhood, of which he has told, when his mother, as she waked, would make a light and come and lean over his bed, till sometimes his eyes would open to see her watching him there. His father did not spare the rod for the careless boy, nor in later years did the father of his soul; but the divine motherhood of memory and of present faith bent with yearning eyes, we may be sure, over his anxious sleep in prison or in the ascetic cell.
But it was only the greatest of all these poets who could leave us the lovely image of the new-born soul that comes forth in its simplicity from the hand that loves it before its birth, playing like a young girl who weeps and smiles. Yet Dante's princ.i.p.al sensation about childhood is its helplessness, and the mother's eyes, which throw its aureole about infancy, do not seem to have held their tenderest meaning for him. He would never have gone beyond the original ten lines of
”She was a phantom of delight.”