Part 12 (1/2)
Her letters evidently moved the monk, for his replies were full of good advice, and under the surface gave some indications of tender regard.
But the affection that we find is colorless and formal. No word of a husband's gentleness, nor warmth of phrase, not a hint that he cherishes happy memories of the old days of their union. They are the letters of an old man, absorbed in himself, worn by the world, who has no capacity for anything deeper than kind feeling. He calls her his sister, once dear in the world, now dearer in Christ, begs her prayers for him living and dead, and entreats that whenever he may die she will have his body carried to her abbey, that the constant sight of his grave may move her and her spiritual daughters to pray for his salvation. He gulps down the _Lachrima Christi_ of her exquisite love as if it were the small beer of pietistic commonplace, and then looks disappointed to find that it was not. For he ignores the soul of her letters, and composes complacent treatises of twelfth-century ecclesiastical discipline designed to subject her to a mechanical and lifeless asceticism.
Heloise in answer reproaches him for his talk of death, like a brave heart bidding him not by antic.i.p.ation suffer before his time. The knowledge of her husband's unhappiness is a renewed affliction, and she owns that there is nothing but sorrow in her life. Like a daring t.i.taness, she exclaims against G.o.d's administration of his world:
”While we lived in sin, he indulged us; when we married, he forced us to separate. Let his other creatures rejoice and count themselves safe from the inclement clemency of the G.o.d whom I almost dare to call cruel to me in every way. They are safe, for upon me he has used up all the weapons of his wrath, so that he has none with which to rage at others; nor, if any remained, could he find a place in me wherein to strike them.”
After sixteen years' silence, this woman has broken into speech, and unmasked confessions of her inner spirit will no longer be restrained.
She goes on as if carried by cyclone winds; she tells her far-off lover what few nuns under terror of eternal death can ever have brought themselves to confide to their confessors in scarcely audible whisper.
She calls up the scenes of their union; she confesses that visions of that life are with her constantly: she bemoans the thoughts which ”haunt me sometimes, even at the holy ma.s.s.” She was no calm northern woman; she had nothing of the temperament that Shakespeare compared to an icicle
”That's curdied by the frost from purest snow, And hangs on Dian's temple”;
she was made to walk with love, under summer moonlight,--no sister of Percivale, to forget thwarted desire in prayer beneath the frosty stars of winter.
”Help me,” cries this victim of a gloomy religion, ”for I do not find how by penance to appease G.o.d, whom I still accuse of the greatest cruelty. It is easy to confess and to torture the body; it is hard to tear the soul from its desires. My mind keeps the same wish for sin; so sweet was our happiness that I cannot be sorry for it. Most wretched life, if I have endured so much in vain, destined to have no recompense hereafter.”
Thus Heloise the woman and Heloise the abbess fight out the old problem whether the training of life is by the use of its gifts, or by the rejection of them; shall we play the full organ, or only the harsh reed stops? The church taught her to condemn what nature taught her to justify. The religious authority of all the dark ages confronted this woman's instincts of life, and--to her honor--it could not quell them.
Yet conceive her wretchedness and the anguish of her mental struggle, living as she did in the middle of Catholic mediaevalism. When, after a scanty rest, she left her cell at midnight, this artificial conscience attended her to the long chapel service that followed, pointed at the austere pages over which she bent in the study when the service was over, kept calling her hypocrite as she chided and instructed the nuns whom she is said to have ruled so wisely, s.n.a.t.c.hed food and wine from her hungry lips, with fast, pitiless las.h.i.+ng wielded the whip of penance, haunted her sleep with its stern face. Yet the pleasures of time were still honorable to her; the world _was_ good; her love _had_ been beautiful; if her conscience prayed forgiveness for it, her heart sang, because she had known it.
To hear this bewildered voice crying to Abelard for his prayers because in spite of the world's praise of her virtue she thinks herself a hypocrite,--Oh, my only one, pray for me, for I cannot be sorry that we loved--to hear this makes one glad that the time has pa.s.sed for identifying the devil with the world's laughter, and G.o.d with its sobbing.
She lived on as abbess of the Paraclete for twenty-one years after she buried her husband. We cannot believe that as one set of feelings cooled with age, her spiritual emotions grew more impulsive. In the twenty-eight years which followed her last letter to Abelard, she no doubt more and more mechanically went through the life of monastic duty, her intellectual accord with the church leading her to an increasingly calm performance of routine piety, her heart more and more silent--but never dead. We fancy its main utterance an antic.i.p.ation of that cry of Clough's--”Submit, submit.” Thus kindling with no spiritual ardor--(she once confessed that her religious ambition did not rise so high as to wish a crown of victory, or to have G.o.d's strength made perfect in her weakness), she lived out her faithful and successful life as abbess of the Paraclete, comforted--we may hope--by a continuance of the intellectual consolations of her youth, and honored, as we know, by church and world. If imaginary biography is ever safe we may employ it here, and fancy that when she came to die she repeated what she had said years before, that she should be quite content to be given just a corner in heaven. I think as she lay waiting to be received there, she dreamed of looking up from it, not at the ineffable glory, but at one human face stationed highest among the masters in divine philosophy. Highest among the masters! Less than a hundred and fifty years later, the great poem of mediaevalism forgot to give Abelard a place even among the penitents of purgatory, and to-day except by special students he is remembered only as Heloise's unworthy lover.
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FOOTNOTES:
[13] _Petri Abaelardi Historia Calamitatum. Petri Abaelardi et Heloissae Epistolae._
[14] _Bilder aus der deutschen Vergangenheit_, iii., 14-34.
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APPENDIX.
At the suggestion of the publishers the following brief notices of some of the works and authors mentioned in these essays are added for convenience of reference.
aeTHIOPICA, the oldest and most famous of the Greek romances. It narrates the loves of Theagenes and Charicleia, and was written in his youth by Heliodorus of Emesa, who flourished about the end of the fourth century, and died as Bishop of Tricca in Thessaly.