Studies in mediæval life and literature
&iM '/AM Hf U>^1 '\A fj i m'»ji 'A Ki^ w. v:M.r, rk ? 1 ^^.■r 1 mvi^l %iit anil ^.xtjeratnr:e Ss %&- Qpp^necticu Agrl^tiltural CoiT< wKO^ V O L .- L-J8 -4...oL CLA^fcS NO ;^ 4 P*.l .\-.^..^.^F- ^^0.1 fY\^^.a \ "g BOOK 940. 1.M222 c 1 3 "iisa 002i27Ma 0 STUDIES IN MEDI/EVAL LIFE ^^^ AND LITERATURE U'lH BY EDWARD TOMPKINS MCLAUGHLIN PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND BELLES-LETTRES IN YALE UNIVERSITY ^ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET 24 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND C^e futithcvbocher ^ress 1894 Copyright, 1894 BY SARAH B. McLaughlin Entered at Stationers' Hall, London By G. p. Putnam's Sons 9 4 5.5. Electrotyped, Printed and Bound by Ubc TRnicherbocfter press, "Wew l^orft G. P. Putnam's Sons I^®vi^>fl^f.^-^ CONTEN'I'S. PAGE Introduction v The Medieval Feeling for Nature . . i Ulrich von Liechtenstein : The Memoirs of an OLD German Gallant . . . . -34 Neidhart von Reuenthal and his Bavarian Peasants 71 Meier Helmbrecht : a German Farmer of the Thirteenth Century ..... 100 Childhood in Medieval Literature A M.EDIyEVAL WoMAN Appendix ..... 123 152 INTRODUCTION. EDWARD TOMPKINS McLAUGHI^IN, the writer of the essays contained in this volume, was born at Sharon, Connecticut, on May 28, i860. ,He was the son of the Reverend D. D. T. Mcl^aughlin, a graduate of Yale College of the class of 1834. His mother's maiden name was Mary Whit- tlesey Brownell. She was the daughter of the Rever- end Grove L,. Brownell, who was settled for many years over the Congregational church of Cromwell, Connecticut. Thus it will be seen that the author of this work belonged on both sides to what Oliver Wendell Holmes has aptly called the Brahman caste of New England. At the time of his birth his father was pastor of the Congregational church of Sharon, Connecticut, but in 1866 left that place for Morris in the same county. There he remained until 1872 when he gave up parish duties entirely, and retired to Litchfield, which he thenceforward made his permanent home. With the exception of a short time spent in the Litchfield Academy, the son was fitted for college almost wholly by his father, who was himself a finished scholar in Latin and Greek. He entered Yale in the autumn of 1879, and received the degree of A.B. in vi Intj^oductioiL 1883. From the very beginning of his university life he was distinguished for his interest in English litera- ture, and during the entire course of it displayed remarkable proficiency in the pursuit of that study. To him, before his graduation, fell the highest honors which the college has to bestow in that department. After receiving his bachelor's degree he remained another year in New Haven as a graduate student. During that time he devoted himself with increased ardor to the special branches of study in which from the outset he had been interested. In the following year he was made tutor in English. This position he held until 1890, when he was appointed assistant pro- fessor of the same subject. At the meeting of the Corporation of the University in May, 1893, he was elected by it to the chair of Rhetoric and Belles- Lettres. Happily married to a wife of congenial tastes, who speedily learned to sympathize with him in the studies which he had made peculiarly his own, he had every reason to expect a long career of usefulness, which would be attended with distinction to himself and would confer distinction upon the institution with which he was connected. But his health had never been vigorous, and in the very summer vacation fol- lowing his appointment a fever, which came upon him almost without warning, and which seemed at first of slight importance, carried him off after an illness that lasted little more than a week. He died on the 25th of July, 1893, at the age of thirty-three. He lies buried at lyitchfield. Such is a brief sketch of the life of the author of this volume. He had at the time of his death many pro- jects on hand, some partly carried out, some only in contemplation. In 1893 he had edited a volume of hitrodztctioii, vii selections from English writers under the title of Literary Criticism for Studeiits ; and since his death a school-edition of Marlowe's Edward II., prepared by him, but left mainly in manuscript, has come from the press. But these w^ere in a measure tasks imposed upon him by the needs of students, and not those undertaken in consequence of his own inclinations. During the last year of his life, however, he had been devoting himself to the preparation for publication of the following essays. He had long been a student of mediaeval literature, not merely of that found in the English tongue, but of the much fuller and more varied work that had been produced at an early period on the continent. The writers of France, of Germany, and of Italy, belonging to that period, were in truth so familiar to him that he was sometimes disposed to assume that general acquaintance with them on the part of others which it is the fortune of but few to possess. Some results of this study he now set about putting into permanent form. The first rough draft of the essays here printed had been finished when the fatal illness fell upon him that carried him away. There is no intention of apologizing either for the matter or the manner of the pieces contained in this volume. They are in no need of it, and in any event what is published must stand or fall upon its own merits. Yet it is the barest justice to the author of these essays to state that not in a single instance do they represent the final form they would have assumed, had he lived to review and revise the first sketches he made. In the case of two of them, which were nearest to the condition in which they were ultimately to appear, evidences of their incompleteness in his own eyes are plainly seen in the manuscripts. Against par- Vlll Introduction. ticular passages and sometimes whole paragraphs there were marginal notes, indicating that the expres- sion was to undergo alteration of various kinds. In several instances a place was marked for the insertion of a transition paragraph which had apparently never been written out, though its character was suggested. These, of course, had all to be disregarded. The con- dition of things, furthermore, was much worse with the four which had not been so fully completed as the two just mentioned. In the case of these the matter had to be collected and pieced together, at no slight expenditure of time and trouble, from scattered leaves of manuscript, in which it was not always easy to trace out the exact order. Unfortunately, one essay, intended to be the longest and most important of all, could not be included in this volume. Professor Mclyaughlin had been for many years an ardent admirer of Dante. To a study of the early life of the great Italian poet he had de- voted years of patient research. It was the one sub- ject in which he had the deepest interest, and upon which he had expended the most labor, and he pur- posed to make the essay dealing with it the principal piece in the work he was preparing. But, as was not unnatural, it was the one essay which needed most the revising hand of its composer. The gaps in it were too numerous and important to justify its insertion in the unfinished condition in which it existed, and this particular piece, upon which the author himself set most store, has been reluctantly laid aside. But while it is simple justice to state the facts just given, it must not be inferred that these essays, unfin- ished and even fragmentary as they might have seemed to the writer, will so appear to the reader. Few there Intro dtictzon. ix will be who will detect that any part of them has failed to receive the full attention to which it is en- titled. Nor is it likely, indeed, that the sentiments expressed in these essays would have undergone any material modification, whatever changes might have been made in the manner in which they were set forth. Doubtless some of the points now found in them would have been amplified, others would have been re- trenched. Other views again, to which no allusion is made here, would have been introduced. Still, so complete in themselves are the essays in most par- ticulars, that no thought of their incompleteness would have arrested the attention of any save the smallest possible number of readers, had not the condition in which they were left been mentioned in this introduction. But even had these essays needed much more than they do the revising hand of the author, none the less cordially would they have been received by those who were familiar with his personal presence. Especially is this true of students possessed of literary taste, who have been under his instruction, and it is largely in compliance with their wishes that the publication of this volume was determined upon. For as a teacher Professor Mclvaughlin, though still young, had at- tained eminence. He had in particular the rare quality of inspiring those under him with the same zeal for learning and the same love of literature that animated himself. The teacher of English, it must be confessed, has set before him a task of special difiiculty. In the case of other tongues the business of translation, with the verbal and grammatical investigation implied by it, must always constitute the principal part of the work of preparation for the class-room ; and the skill and X Inti^oditctioii, knowledge with which it is performed will of neces- sity be the main element in testing the proficiency and success of the student. But in the case of English this main part of the usual preparation has been reduced to a minimum. The business has already been done at the pupil's hands. He knows, at least after a fashion, the meaning of the words, even if he does not always comprehend the meaning of the phrase or sentence as a whole in which they are found. The hard task is, therefore, given the teacher of English of starting in his instruction at the point where the teacher of other languages ends. He is, furthermore, to make his sub- ject one of pleasure and profit to that select body of students, who are eager to gain from the pursuit of it all the benefit possible. He is at the same time expected to exact some degree of labor from those who, whether by their own fault or the fault of others, have no interest in this particular subject, if indeed they have interest in any subject whatever. The temptation naturally presents itself to sacrifice the former class to the latter. Especially does this appeal to instructors who are deficient in the literary sense, or who possessing it, lack the ability to arouse it in those under them. The easy process is resorted to of turning the study into one of a purely linguistic character, in which the discussion of words will take the place of the discussion of literature. This is a cheap though convenient method for the teacher to evade the real work he is called upon to perform, and while it maybe followed by some incidental advantages, it is almost in the nature of a crime against letters to associate in the minds of young men, at the most impressionable period of their lives, the writings of a great author with a drill that is mainly verbal or philological. Introduction. xi It was the rare fortune of Professor Mcl^aughlin that he solved this problem, presented to every instructor in English, with a felicity that does not fall often to the lot of those engaged in the same occupation. It was not so much in imparting knowledge that his peculiar distinction lay ; it was in his success in inspiring interest in the subject and zeal for its prosecution. It is, there- fore, more especially to those w^ho have been under his teaching that this little volume is addressed as a me- morial of one to whom many will acknowledge is due the first bent their minds received to the study and appre- ciation of what is best and highest in literature. What its author would have accomplished with his remark- able powers of acquisition and assimilation, had he lived to carry out and perfect plans which he had in contemplation, it is idle to conjecture ; and the world, which cares but little for what is actually done in the field in which he was largely working, cannot be ex- pected to concern itself with that which was never more than projected. But there are some to whom the result of his labors, shown in this volume, will prove of interest for what it is ; while to those who have known him personally, it will, even in its compara- tively imperfect state, furnish a suggestive intimation of what might have been. T. R. IvOUNSBURY Yai<e University, March 22, 1894. MEDIEVAL LIFE AND LITERATURE THE MEDI^VAI. FEEI.ING FOR NATURE. ON the 26th April, 1335, Mt. Ventoux, near Avignon, was the scene of a remarkable occur- rence. Petrarch was the hero, and on the evening of that day, while the impression was yet strong upon him, he wrote an account of it to a friend. The incident was nothing less than climbing a moun- tain for aesthetic gratification. That he cared to do it showed that Petrarch was on the outskirts of medisevalism. The narrative is so interesting that I may translate a part of it ; for the great humanist's letters are inaccessible to general readers. He says that he had thought of climbing the mountain for many years, since he had known the country from early boyhood, and the great mass of rocky cliff, entirely rugged and almost inaccessible, was constantly and everywhere visible. He took with him his brother and two ser- vants. As they were starting on the ascent, they fell in with an aged shepherd, who tried to dissuade them. Fifty years before he had climbed to the summit, moved by a boyish impulse — and he supposed himself the only one who had ever done it ; his recollections I 2 MedicEval Life and Literahu^e, were full of awe and terror. But the poet pressed on, beguiling the weariness, which at times amounted almost to exhaustion, by moralizing on the labor as a type of spiritual attainments. At the summit of the highest peak, "moved deeply at first by that vast spectacle, and affected by the unusual lightness of the air, I stood as if overwhelmed. I looked, and under my feet I saw the clouds." His thoughts turned to the classical myths, and the history of his beloved Italy. He recalled that ten years before, on that same day, he had left Bologna and his studies. How many changes in his ways. His wrong loves — he loved them no longer, or rather he no longer liked to love them. He thought of his future. " Thus rejoicing in what I had gained, regretful of my weak- ness, and pitying the common instabihty of human affections, I seemed to forget where I was and why I had come. At last I turned to the occasion of my expedition. The sinking sun and lengthening shadows admonished me that the hour of depart- ure was at hand, and, as if started from sleep, I turned around and looked to the west. The Pyrenees— the eye could not reach so far, but I saw the mountains of Lyonnais distinctly, and the sea by Marseilles ; the Rhone, too, was there before me. Observing these closely, now thinking on the things of earth, and again, as if I had done with the body, lifting my mind on high, it occurred to me to take out the copy of St. Augustine's Confessions that I always kept with me ; a little volume, but of unlimited value and charm. And I call God to witness that the first words on which I cast mine eyes were these : * Men go to wonder at the heights of mountains, the ocean floods, rivers' long courses, ocean's immensity, the revolutions of the stars, — and of themselves they have no care ! ' My brother asked me what was the matter. I bade him not disturb me. I closed the book, angry with myself for not ceasing to admire things of earth, instead of remembering that the human soul is beyond comparison the subject for admiration. Once and again, as I TJie McdicEval Feeling for Nature, 3 descended, I gazed back, and the lofty summit of the mountain seemed to me scarcely a cubit high, compared with the sublime dignity of man." ' In these sentences we find the new life and the old in the same mind. Such an action would have been impossible for a genuine son of the middle ages, but could Petrarch stand on a mountain top to-day, such an outcome of it would be equally impossible. His feeling for nature was intense even to a sense of the charm of ruggedness in hills, as Burckhardt, who refers to this letter in his work on The Italian Renaissance, shows by ample quotations ; but the intense lover of nature in the nineteenth century, though his ethical sense be as deep as Wordsworth's, finds a different influence in such a scene. Indeed, read in Wordsworth himself, the modern contrast : " Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth And ocean's liquid mass, in gladness lay Beneath him ; far and wide the clouds were touched, And in their silent faces could he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank The spectacle ; sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him ; they swallowed up His animal being, in them did he live. And by them did he live : they were his life. In such access of mind, in such high hour Of visitation from the living God, Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired. No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request. Rapt into still communion, that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise." How far apart is the piety of the two poets, how different their absorption. This identification of the ^ Lit. Fam., iv., i. 4 MedicEval Life and Lita^atitre, human mood with Nature, and the spiritual elation that arises from the union, is thoroughly characteristic of the present century. Wordsworth's peculiar beauty, as Hartley Coleridge told Caroline Fox, "consisted in viewing things as amongst them, mixing himself up in everything that he mentions, so that you admire the man in the thing, the involved man." And Hartley's inspired father uttered a great criticism on the modern feeling for nature, when in the Ode on Dejection he cried, " Oh, lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth nature live." No literary contemporaries were ever more apart than Wordsworth and Byron, yet Childe Harold has the same note : *' I live not in myself, but I become Portion of that around me ; and to me High mountains are a feeling. . the soul can flee And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain Of ocean, or the stars, mingle and not in vain." We discover the same sentiment, more delicately held, in Keats, as in some of his sayings about flowers, and Shelley, speaking of the longing for a response to one's own nature, says : "The discovery of its antitype, this is the invisible and un- attainable point to which love tends. . . . Hence in solitude, or in that state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, and the grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the motions of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is found a secret corre- spondence with our heart, that awakens the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and brings tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic rapture, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone," The MedicEval Feeling for Nature. 5 Yet this spirit, with which our later poetry is almost ever>'where touched, ' ' this m3'sterious anal- ogy between human emotions and the phenomena of the world without us," as von Humboldt expresses it, in its present comprehensiveness is new to litera- ture. To feel for mountains, forests, or the ocean, with mingled awe, love, and ecstasy, seems so natural to us, that we can hardly realize that Gray was striking a novel and significant chord when he wrote at the Grande Chartreuse, " One of the most solemn, the most romantic, and the most astonishing scenes . .. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. ' ' In Petrarch's letter we observe the deficiency in ab- sorbing enthusiasm for the grander forms of nature, as well as his sense of the isolation of vSuch sentiment from true spiritual life. Yet this letter is the most sig- nificant indication which we possess from the middle ages of a capacity for enjoying the sublimity of heights. In Pr^terita, Ruskin, while describing his eagerness at the first sight of the Alps, as a boy, has written two or three sentences that we may employ to illustrate the contrast between Petrarch and his pre- decessors : ** Till Rousseau's time there had been no 'sentimental ' love of nature ... St. Bernard of La Fontaine, looking out to Mont Blanc with bis child's eyes, sees above Mont Blanc the Madonna ; St, Bernard of Talloires, not the Lake of Annecy, but the dead between Martigny and Aosta. But for me, the Alps and their people were alike beautiful in their snow, and their humanity ; and I wanted, neither for them nor myself, sight of any thrones in heaven but the rocks, or of any spirits in heaven but the clouds." Others, beside the Bernards, men from whose cul- 6 MedicEval Life and Literature, ture and intelligence we should expect fine ap- preciation, felt nothing august or inspiring in the material world. So far as we have any record, the fourteenth-centur}^ laureate was the first of the moderns to climb a mountain for the aesthetic pleasure of the view. Burckhardt's suggestion that this honor belongs to Dante, on the strength of a passage in the fourth canto of the Purgatory^ is surely not ten- able ; for the top of Bismantova possessed a citadel in Dante's time to which business may easily have called him. All through the middle ages, the lofty eleva- tions between central Kurope and Italy were constantly being crossed. The most cultivated men were going back and forth as couriers on business of the Church, and the political relations, especialty between Italy and German}^ kept up a continual stream of travel. There is, indeed, in the beginning of a passage from a famous scholar, John of Salisbury, an apparent excep- tion to this vStrange indifference ; but a few clauses correct the hasty judgment. Writing from lyombardy, he explained why he could not send a letter from the Great St. Bernard: "I have been on the mount of Jove : on the one hand looking up to the heaven of the mountains ; on the other, shuddering at the hell of the vallej^s ; feeling myself so much nearer to heaven that I was more sure that my prayer would be heard." Yet this was due to no rapture of soul, for — " Lord, I said, restore me to my brethren, that they come not into this place of torment." He goes on to The MedicEval Feeling for Naiu7^e. 7 specify the perils of ice, precipice, and cold, and noth- ing disturbs him so much as that his ink was frozen. But there is not a suggestion of anything worth looking at. Even Caesar, as von Humboldt reminds us, composed a rhetorical treatise while crossing the Alps. But the poet of Vaucluse did climb a mountain for the love of the view, and the very fact that his aesthetic attention was distracted by ethical introspec- tion is an indication of that serious sensibility which was destined to become such an essential element in our feeling for nature ; what for every Wordsworthian is summed up in the second mood of Tintern Abbey. This incapacity for appreciating mountainous sub- limity involved a blindness to the rugged and pictur- esque on smaller scales. In minor chords, and in combinations of tone superficially discordant, we have learned to recognize some of nature's richest harmonies ; this is one of our marks of development. Closely linked, too, with this first of modern passions for nature, indeed unified with it by the qualities of strength and massiveness, is our feeling for the ocean and great woods. " There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore : There is society where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar." Even deeper than the idea of companionship here is the mystical sense of absorption into that physical world which seems the very dwelling-place of the infinite soul, which finds one of its most remarkable manifestations in an intense and almost defiant sensa- tion of human transitoriness and unimportance, and which is frequently blended with very exultation in the 8 Mediceval Life and Literature, reflection that presently we ourselves shall be unified forever with the unconscious life that stretches out before us : " Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees." There is a strange fascination to the modern mind, in presence of the majesties of nature, in this thought of humanity's return to the earth-mother. Innumerable generations have come home to her, as many or more are to be born that they may follow them, and she remains. Perhaps we are never so serenely conscious of self, as in these rare moments when we bear without a pang the thought of losing personal identity. There is something more here than the certainty of at least materialistic immortality, and the impression of in- finite repose and beauty. The projection of our immediate sensation into the long future silence suffuses nature with panthe- istic life, until the eager and buoyant thrills of spiritual realization render one grateful to have been permitted to gain such a sensation at what seems the trivial cost of feeling oneself the mere creature of a day. Such a mood as this certainly comes but seldom, but probably every one who has ever experienced any imaginative sensibility to a grand landscape will recall a height- ened sensation that is beyond description.' But still stranger than the failure to catch the finer suggestions in the more strenuous forms of nature, is the way in which such sights are ignored. In ' Since this passage was written, I have met with the follow- ing extract fi-om a letter of Tennyson's, dated in 1874, though with no direct reference to the experience being associated with nature : " All at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself has The MedicEval Feeling for Nature. 9 southern Europe, mountains, storms, rocks, the ocean, are scarcely ever described, even as objects of awe or terror. When in the course of a story they have to be mentioned, the treatment is brief and matter of fact. Heinrich von Veldeke in his famous epic, makes nothing of his necessary introduction of a storm at sea, nor does Gottfried, or indeed any one of this whole period. Gudrun, that epic of the people which deserves to stand near the more famous Niebelungen Lied, treats constantly of the ocean, yet never with any feeling ex- cept dread of shipwreck. This poem, however, shows a more northern tone in one or two descriptions of winter, that are at least elaborated. In the scene, for instance, when Herwig and Ortwin arrive at the shore where Hildeburg and Gudrun, almost naked, are wash- ing the clothes for their cruel mistress, we find some realistic touches, such as their trembling before the March wind, in which their hair was streaming as the}^ toiled on the beach, while before them the sea was full of cakes of ice that had broken up under the early spring. In another connection, too, the poet compares something to a thick snowstorm, driven by mountain winds. The sense of fitness in a sympathetic natural environment for the human action, that has been so generally regarded in literature, as by Shakespeare, is indeed occasionally found in mediaeval poetry ; so in an interesting French romance that relates the trials of a heroine who barely escapes with her life, after the seemed to dissolve aud to fade away into boundless being ; and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were), seeming no extinction, but the only true life." lO MedicEval Life and Literature. loss of everything dear : ' ' The lady is in the wood and bitterly she wails. She hears the wolves howl, and the screech-owls cry ; it lightens terribly, and the thunder is heavy, rain, hail, and wind — 't is wild for a lady all alone." Exceptions occur now and then. Dante, for example, was impressed by the mountains ; no readers of the Purgatory need to be reminded of his experience in climbing them. The setting for a mood of unrealized love in one of his lyrics is in winter, among the whitened hills : " He wooed the lady in a lovely grassy meadow, surrounded by lofty hills. ' ' But the arbitrary verbal repetitions of the sestina modify the original face of the image of the mountains towering about the lover's plain, and the pensive beauty of the whole poem may be connected with an allegory. But I believe that even in Dante we never catch the sense of exultation in the earth's power and majesty. Our modern feeling for forests is not only at times sombre and oppressive ; we also derive a sense of sub= lime composure from them. This latter sentiment was hardly shared by the mediae vals. Dante was only fol- lowing earlier poets when he located the opening of Hell by a gloomy wood, and his repeated metaphor of life as a forest, ' ' confusing, " ' ' gloomy, ' ' and * ' dark, ' ' accords with the feeling of his age. He would not have appreciated Chateaubriand. He has left us, how- ever, a rare and interesting reference to the soughing in the pines on the Adriatic, which shows how well his ear could interpret its solemn beauty. The mysti- cal apple-tree, moreover, near the close of the Purgatory^ whose blossoms are so exquisitely defined, indirectly reminds us how exceptional is a mention of fruit trees in flower. / Yet the Provencal, French, and German i— - The MedicBval Feeling for Nature. 1 1 lyrics constantly begin with the joyousness of spring, and the happy contrast from the season that destroys flowers and foliage. Nothing is more conventional than these nature preludes. Over and over, till we close our books impatiently, we hear reiterations of the charm of spring and summer. There is a slender kind of grace and sincerity that would lend interest to many of these, if they had come down by themselves ; but they lie together in books in wearisome uniformity. A dandelion in April is much prettier than the dandelions in June. These preludes are usually in keeping with the love-phrases that follow, cold and imitative. For poets thought and felt in exterior generalities, rather than in detachment and inner consciousness. Their typical landscape may be seen in a passage from Gott- fried von Strassburg, — one of Germany's most brilliant poets — where Tristan and Isolde have fled to the forest grotto, in fear of King Mark. The grotto is fitted up luxuriously, in keeping with the temper of the entire poem, but since it is in the wilderness, far away from roads or paths, in a description of its surroundings we might certainly look for a sense of the picturesque. But so far from caring for the wild and rugged, Gott- fried does not even like a quiet woodland simplicity. "Above the entrance stood three broad lindens, no more; but below, stretching down the slope, were innumerable trees that hid the retreat. On one side was a level stretch where a fountain flowed, a fresh, cool stream, clearer than the sun. Above it, too, stood three beautiful shady lindens that shielded the spring from rain and the sun. Bright blossoms and green grass struggled with each other sweetly on the field. One caught also the delightful songs of birds which sang more de- lightfully there than anywhere else. Bye and ear each had its pleasure, there was shade and sun, air and breezes soft and pleasing." 12 Mediceval Life and Literature, He goes on to describe the lovers, in a passage from which I translate the opening : When they waked and when they slept, Side by side they ever kept. In the morning o'er the dew Softly to the field they drew, Where, beside the little pool, Flowers and grass were dewy cool. And the cool fields pleased them well, Pleased them, too, their love to tell, Straying idly thro' the glade. Hearing music, as they strayed. Sweetly sang the birds, and then In their walk they turned again Where the cool brook rippled by, Listening to the melody, As it flowed and as it went : Where across the field it bent. There they sat them down to hear, Resting there, its murmur clear. And until the sunshine blazed. In the rivulet they gazed. These lines are characteristic of Gottfried, even to the lingering verbal repetition, and the picture certainly is pretty, as is the whole account of the lovers' life that follows. Nothing in early German literature comes closer to refined modern sensuousness than Gottfried's best passages ; there is a dreamy passion in them, and sometimes they flash. His rich voluptuous strain has more of the poet than the free-liver, and his general tone is curiously modern. It would be a showy phrase to call his Tristan the Do7i Juan of the middle ages, for the poems are very dissimilar, yet it is safe to say that we think of Byron as we read him. Contrast these representative poets of the thirteenth and nine- The Mediceval Feeling for Nature. 1 3 teenth centuries in this matter of their feeHng for nature. For once among German settings we have a wild scene. / But we observe how studiously it is modified into the conventional meadow, with trees in uniform little groups, a grassy field is sprin- kled with flowers, there is a spring, and the little stream that escapes from it instead of tumbling dowri over a rocky bed into a glen, flows across the field./ Gottfried mentions mountains and rocks that lie round about, only to point out that they are types of the dif- ficulties and perils to be undergone before reaching love's shrine. The almost inaccessible retreat was necessary as a shelter for the fugitives from Mark's court; the poet has done his best to obliterate the reality. If we turn to Byron, and look for instance at that incomparable passage in which he relates the early love of Juan and Haidee, we observe where he voluntarily places his lovers : " It was a wild and breaker-beaten coast, With cliffs above and a broad sandy shore ; Guarded by shoals and rocks as by a host, With here and there a creek, whose aspect wore A better welcome to the tempest-tost ; And rarely ceased the haughty billows' roar." " And thus they wandered forth, and hand in hand. Over the shining pebbles and the shells, Glided along the smooth and hardened sand, And in the worn and wild receptacles Worked by the storms, yet worked as it were planned. In hollow halls, with sparry roofs and cells. They turned to rest ; and each clasped by an arm. Yielded to the deep twilight's purple charm." And, to pass over the description of sky, sea, moon, and starlight, that follows, as elements in the nature- setting, notice the scene where Juan is sleeping : 14 MedicEval Life and Literature. " The lady watched her lover, and that hour Of Love's, and Night's, and Ocean's solitude, O'erflowed her soul with their united power, Amid the barren sand and rocks so rude. She and her wave-worn love had made their bower." It would be easy to parallel these two situations ; the older by no means ends with the middle ages, for Kden's "blissful bower" is no exception in modern poetry before the romantic age : while in our own cen- tury counterparts to this conception of untrained and strenuous natural surroundings for even the happiest of emotions will occur to every one. ' The idle triteness in those inevitable scenes of spring, was manifest to some of the poets themselves. So the Comte de Cham- pagne declares foliage and flowers of no service to poets, except for rhyming and to amuse commonplace people. The great Wolfram himself derides the con- ventionality of all romance narratives falling in spring and early summer : Arthur is the man of May ; Bach event in every lay, Happened or at Whitsuntide Or when the May was blooming wide. And Uhland cites from the lives of the troubadours the contemporaneous criticism upon a minor poet of ' Any student of Dante, who recalls his lovely early sonnet, Giiido, vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io, and compares it with Shelley's almost parallel conception of lovers sailing away in indivisible companionship, in the latter part of Epipsychidion, will obtain an excellent illustration of this same difference of feeling about the natural setting for a happy love. In Dante the sentiment is vague, and only what is peaceful, while Shel- ley's ideal haunt of lovers admits owls and bats with the ring- dove, an " old cavern hoar" left unadorned, mos.sy mountains, and quivering waves. The MedicEval Feeling for Nature. 15 the twelfth century, who wrote in the old style about leaves, and flowers, and the song of birds, — nothing of any account. We may recollect that such criticisms go far back of the middle ages : Horace glances at his contemporaries' conventional descriptions of a stream hastening through pleasant fields. In the widely popular romances of Enid we find illustrations of Welsh, French, and German treatment in the hands of leading authors, and there is one point in the narrative where we may compare their feeling for the natural environment. Readers of Tennyson will recall the passage in the wandering, where, after one of Geraint's struggles with bandits, he comes upon a lad carrying provisions. Chrestien's treatment of the episode is clear and straightforward ; the youth and two comrades are taking cheese, cakes, and wine to the count's meadows for the haymakers. The young man notices the travellers' worn appearance, and in- vites them to sit down ' ' in this fair meadow, under these ironwood trees," to rest and eat. Hartmann von Aue (whose paraphrase of the French poem is, by the way, far from the merit of his Iwchi) narrates the incident in the same manner, omitting the poetically specific touches of the haymaking, and the shady spot in the field ; but characteristically inserting some courteous concern on the part of the young man, for the comfort of Enid. But if we turn to the Mabinogion we come upon something very difierent : "And early in the day they left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand, and mowers mowing the meadows ; and there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a lofty steep, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck, and they saw that there 1 6 MedicBval Life and Literature, was something in the satchel, but they knew not what it was. And he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher." How charming it is, even to the lovely touch of color. We know here that the un remembered writer saw nature and cared for it as we do. Indeed, this mediaeval Welshman satisfies us quite as well as does even Tennyson's transcript : ** So through the green gloom of the wood they passed, And issuing under open heavens beheld A little town with towers, upon a rock : And close beneath, a meadow gemlike chased In the brown wild, and mowers mowing in it : And down a rocky pathway from the place There came a fair-hair'd youth, that in his hand Bare victual for the mowers." There we have a simplicity treated with Tennyso- nian artifice, which ' ' victual ' ' does not succeed in cor- recting ; beautiful in its way, though its way is perhaps not so fine as the prose. Yet we notice the modern spirit in the appreciation of the ' ' brown wild ' ' as well as the meadow, and out of the more general and evasive * ' steep ' ' is developed the picturesque ' ' rocky pathway. ' ' Except for the interest in establishing these forms of nature-appreciation from such older and more original sources, we might have satisfied ourselves with illustrations of them from Chaucer's early poems, where his descriptions are almost w^holly derivative. His feeling for "the smale, softe, swote gras," that was sweetly embroidered with flowers ; the earth's joy- ous oblivion of the cold, in her enthusiasm of May ; his constant delight in the ''smale foules," and the The MedicEval Feeling for Nature. 1 7 like, are purely conventional, though the unction with which he writes shows his real enjoyment. There are touches in Chaucer, however, that we miss in his romance predecessors, such as his eye for delicate effects — most interesting as marking the growth of accurate observation and sensitive rendering, like the description of twilight in Troyhis and Creyseyde, when " White thynges wexen dymme and donne Forlakke of lyght," or the graceful illustration in the same poem of a sud- den troubling of one's mood : " But right as when the sonne shyneth brighte In March that chaungeth ofte tyme his face, And that a cloude is put with wynde to flyght, Which overspret the sonne, as for a space, A cloudy thought gan through his soule pace." Such a touch makes us feel how modern he is. Yet he does not love the picturesque. Under the influence of a Breton lay, he writes in the loveliest of all his tales, of the rugged sea-coast on whose high bank Dorigen and her friends used to walk (since ' * stood hire castel faste by the see ' ' ) and look down upon " the grisly rokkes blake," which, in her apprehension for her lord's safe return, she would call " these grisly, feendly rokkes blake." But we feel that even had Arviragus been at her side she would never have re- garded the coast as we should regard it. Still we observe the advance in observation and literary expres- sion. 