Chapter II: Part 2

"Many a man looks out at the stars, and tells what wonders take place there. Let him tell me now (something closer at hand), what is the weed in the garden. If he tells me that truly, I shall be more ready to believe the other." It is the germ of Tennyson's _Flower in the Crannied Wall_. Nature's commonplaces hold the heavenly mystery in a common bond with their own. Such subtle blendings of the outward and inward vision could come only from a refined and pensive spirit--such as his who sums up thus the discipline of life: "Many a time the lips must smile when the heart weeps."

One of the marked deficiencies of all these descriptions of nature is in the indefiniteness of the terms employed. In minute accuracy, Dante, to be sure, is one of the world's greatest masters; but elsewhere it is rarely that we come upon anything concrete or specific. It is not until centuries later, indeed, that, so far as nature goes, we find habitual composition "with the eye upon the object," but, as it seems, most mediaeval poets never carried their observation beyond the barest general impressions. We do not expect Tennyson's "More black than ashbuds in the front of March," or Browning's eye for the fact that when "the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly," the red is about to turn gray. The outer world's "open secret" is not open enough to make us demand minute attention. But it is surprising that they did not more frequently record easy impressions, and in their inventions introduce definite details. The poetical effect of even apparently prosaic precision is at times imaginative, but the art of this was kept for the later romanticists.

There is a lyric, however (belonging, I believe, to the twelfth century), by a poet of northern France, and written as a satire on the love-romance literature of the age, which contains one or two happy instances of just this missing trait. So charming it is in itself that I have translated it as a whole, though it belongs to an essay on the lyrical romances, instead of on nature. What a light touch the unknown writer shows, what dainty fancy! Sir Thopas is hardly a parallel to this blending of poetry with humor, a humor too gracious to be derisive, whose genial satire sparkles and dances to meet its sister wave of sentiment and beauty, till they ripple together, and each seems to have absorbed the other. The opening stanza is the poet's introduction of himself, and from the olive we may draw an inference respecting his local associations:

Will ye attend me, while I sing
A song of love,--a pretty thing,
Not made on farms:--
Nay, by a gentle knight 'twas made
Who lay beneath an olive's shade
In his love's arms.

1.

A linen undergown she wore,
And a white ermine mantle, o'er
A silken coat;
With flowers of May to keep her feet,
And round her ankles leggings neat,
From lands remote.

2.

Her girdle was of leafage green;
Spring foliage, with a fringing sheen
Of gold above;
And underneath a love-purse hung,
By bloomy pendants featly strung,
A gift of love.

3.

Upon a mule the lady rode,
The which with silver shoes was shode;
Saddle gold-red;
And behind rose-bushes three
She had set up a canopy
To shield her head.

4.

As so she passed adown the meads,
A gentle childe in knightly weeds
Cried: "Fair one, wait!
What region is thy heritance?"
And she replied: "I am of France,
Of high estate.

5.

"My father is the nightingale,
Who high within the bosky pale,
On branches sings;
My mother's the canary; she
Sings on the high banks where the sea
Its salt spray flings."

6.

"Fair lady, excellent thy birth;
Thou comest from the chief of earth,
Of high estate:
Ah, God our Father, that to me
Thou hadst been given, fair ladye,
My wedded mate!"

Everything here is definite and concrete, and how delightful the picture all is. Such plastic art as the "rose-bushes three" is not unworthy of the great modern poets of whom its magic and romantic definiteness reminds us,--as the "five miles meandering of Alph, the sacred river," or the "kisses four" with which the pale loiterer shut the eyes of La Belle Dame sans Merci. The description of the nightingale on its high branches, too, is a noticeably accurate touch, as we compare it, for example, with Coleridge's nightingale descriptions.

The explanation for the usual vague and indefinite description is not found in saying that they could not describe minutely. We meet with abundant details of such material interests as embroideries or armor. There is artistic emotion in Villehardouin's account of the glorious sight of Constantinople, as it rose before the crusaders, just as distinctly as in Lord Byron's letter. But, to their simple eyes, nature not only failed to suggest associated fancies, like Shakespeare's

"Wrinkled pebbles in the brook,"

or Wordsworth's ash,

"A soft eye-music of slow waving boughs,"

but they see natural objects as units, without lingering upon their parts. When we find, for example, a line that marks the jerky flight of a swallow, we are surprised at the specific touch; we look almost in vain for such landscape details as the colors of autumn. Neidhart von Reuenthal is marking his originality, when he speaks of the red tree-tops, falling down yellow.

The want of observation and the shallow sympathy with nature shown by most poets before Dante are much more surprising than their preference for placid effects. It is unusual, for instance, to meet such a suggestive note of association as in the stanza by the Frenchman Gaces Brulles:

The birds of my own land
In Brittany I hear,
And seem to understand
The distant in the near;
In sweet Champagne I stand,
No longer here.

This paraphrase, indeed, is unworthy of the charming simplicity of the original. Surely, when Matthew Arnold made his sweeping characterization of mediaeval poetry as grotesque, he forgot what a straightforward evolution of narrative or of quiet sentiment, and what a transparent expression, we find in some of these minor poets. They are as direct and unadorned, as they are graceful. It is almost impossible to translate them without substituting for the fresh and delicate touch, some metaphysical warping of the idea, or some rhetorical consciousness in words. What for instance could be more elegantly remote from the grotesque than this literal translation of Brulles' expression of his sensibility to the song-birds of his home: "The birds of my country I have heard in Brittany; by their song I know well that in sweet Champagne I heard them of old."

* * * * *

We may sum up these outline statements to this effect.

The northern poets described storm, winter, the ocean, and kindred subjects, with considerable force and fulness. In the cultivated literatures to the south, natural description was mainly confined to the agreeable forms of beauty; the grand, awesome, and inspiring were scarcely felt, and the literal fact of their physical expression was hardly ever noticed. The exterior world was not made a subject of close observation, nor was its poetic availability realized as a setting for action, or as an interpreter of emotion.

The people of the north, through being habituated to severer weather, not merely as a fact of climate, but from their rougher, less politely organized habits of living, [we should especially observe their activity on the sea,] regarded the violent seasons and aspects of nature with the sympathetic acquiescence of custom. Moreover, this influence tended to develop sturdier and more rugged character, race-temperament obviously being in part a geographical result, which acts with the forces of social organization, especially those that affect the moral qualities, such as rude or luxurious living. This vigorous character was more susceptible to impressions of native power, as well as from association more interested in recalling them. Accordingly, we find the early northern poetry an anticipation of the seriousness of modern English literature, and, as well, of its unequalled recognition of physical symbolisms of the sublime. Where the northern force blended with more southern lightness and elegance, as it did in the _Mabinogion_, we find a deeper poetic sentiment; where it coincides with moral earnestness, we find such nature sensation as in the poetry of _Sir Gawayn_. But the literature of the Germans and their romance originals, aim at courtly levities; they artificialize sentiment and thought, as well as manner. The deeper and more spiritually sympathetic minds did not as a rule devote themselves to _belles-lettres_. The Church drew them into her sober service, and even though they wrote, the close theological faith was not favorable to their poetic expansion. Most of all, there was but little individualism, and any artistic sensation of our modern complex inner consciousness was still crude, even when it existed at all.

One point, however, should be observed in any inquiry into the reasons for the inadequateness of these ages' feeling for nature; that many latent sympathies may never have found a voice. Many through the centuries before our later ease of publication, may have felt the modern sensations, without ever thinking of putting them into words. In any new movement, of art as of practice, a great leader of expression is needed. Men are sheep to their leaders in various admirations, and many genuine aesthetic tastes are acquired, through stages of more or less unconscious imitation. Browning puts this in an acute sentence where Fra Lippo Lippi explains his usefulness as a painter:

". . . We're made so that we love,
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see."

There were few new departures, there was little originality, in the methods of mediaeval literature. Descriptions of the physical world as a field of power and sublimity would have fallen dead on the ears of a public who had never dreamed that storm and cliffs were beautiful. What if Wordsworth had tried to support himself and win fame by singing at castles? Nor is it easy, though the taste has been established, to describe a sunset, or the sublimity of the Alps. We say to each other "How beautiful!" "How grand!" seldom more. Rare imagination and the tact of genius are necessary to tell what we really need to show. The sense of physical sublimity is complex. Its distinctive element is moral or spiritual emotion. For a full delineation it requires a more subtle, verbal repertory than those popular poets usually possessed. Yet these modifications no longer apply when we come to Dante, and superior as his interpretations are to his predecessors' we miss even in him, as we miss in the great poets for four hundred years afterwards, appreciation of the material world's sublimity.

Macaulay and others have said that it was not until man had become the master of nature that he learned to love its stern and violent aspects. But thunder storms, for example, are as dangerous now as they ever were, at least to a traveller. Still, Byron wrote of them with raptures amid the Pindus mountains as his predecessors did not.

Winter was scarcely colder or bleaker for mediaeval poets than for Scottish peasants a century ago, yet Burns would sing as they could not:

"E'en winter bleak has charms for me,
When winds rave through the naked tree."

Others have accounted for this change by the era of science, with its close scrutiny of the world, and its enthusiasm for physical knowledge. But the scientist masters the world as a reality where the poet sees it as a symbol. The two modern tendencies may be the result of a common cause--that recognition of complexity, and disposition to observe, which is a main fact in man's expansion.

A better explanation may be found, I believe, in modern refinement and ethical sensitiveness.

Side by side with the new appreciation of nature may be observed a steady growth in sensibility. Our modern moods of inward contemplation--we are famous for them--our modern zeal for humanity down to its lowest grades; nay, even our tenderness for the brutes, have been distinguishing marks of the poet guides under whom we have learned to appreciate our new physical symbolisms of human emotion. Modern melancholy, as well, a melancholy more subtle and thoughtful, more poetical too, than that of mediaevalism, has touched men with its pensive fascination. Philosophical pantheism such as Wordsworth's or Tennyson's, feels deity in nature; the new Christianity incarnates divinity in universal man. Man is more than he used to be, his moods are deeper, his thought freer. He seeks more ardently than of old, because with less constraint, the mystery in whom he lives and moves and has his being. He no longer quails before the majesty and awe of its forever elusive presence. For he knows that though he cannot find it, it enfolds him with love and beauty, it cries back to his passion and pain in winter and storm; from the solemn mountains it reminds him of himself, an unconquerable partner of its own eternity.

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Lit. Fam._, iv., 1.

[2] Since this passage was written, I have met with the following extract from 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 seemed to dissolve and 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."

[3] Any student of Dante, who recalls his lovely early sonnet, _Guido, 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 Shelley's ideal haunt of lovers admits owls and bats with the ring-dove, an "old cavern hoar" left unadorned, mossy mountains, and quivering waves.

[4] We recall his great countryman's modern cry: "Wohin es geht, wer weiss es? Erinnert er sich doch kaum, woher er kam."

[Decoration]

ULRICH VON LIECHTENSTEIN.

THE MEMOIRS OF AN OLD GERMAN GALLANT.

Any one who has read Freytag's excellent studies of German social life will recall a curious illustration in his first volume of the lawless violence of thirteenth-century knighthood, in the imprisonment of Ulrich von Liechtenstein by his liegeman Pilgerin. The account not only proves the author's point, but it goes on to suggest a good deal besides. For the victim's unsophisticated and plaintive manner under his misfortune, the fashion in which he relates what he suffered, his allusions to his own life and character, and most of all to the consolations of his love, are all stimulating to one's curiosity about the writer. When we go to the mediaeval shelves of a German library we find this curiosity satisfied in a long poem by the unfortunate Ulrich, and immediately we are in that chivalric age which wins most of its romantic lustre from its devotion to womanhood.

If our guesses at a truth beneath the stories of widowed ladies rescued from bandits of the forest and recreant knights, or of lovely ladies rescued from worse than death by the capture of castles through the prowess of generous champions--stories which every one knows and incredulously likes--send us to a study of the times when they were composed, we find that the age, when stripped of romantic embellishments, in its actual life felt a sentiment for women unequalled by earlier times. We wonder what caused it. Can it have been the increase in the culture of the Virgin, that beautiful and beneficent phase of mediaeval religion? In its larger development, this appears rather the parallel expression of some common influence, these adorations of the divine and human conceptions of woman seeming to be mutually impulsive, and drawn alike from some undetermined tendency of social and spiritual refinement. Or was it the Crusades? For a German essayist has suggested that we may count this increase of sentimentalism among their many influences upon western Europe; the beauty of the women and the more luxurious habits of the East, its more effeminate emotionalism, finding impressionable subjects in the hearts of those stranger knights lying, wakeful for home, beneath southern stars. Perhaps the conjecture is equally reasonable that the influence came from French poets who, as they travelled with the early Christian armies, caught such suggestions from snatches of oriental poetry. Yet it seems more natural to regard the growth of knightly sentiment toward ladies as the more delicate manifestation of a spontaneous increase of social personality, which was stimulated by that general motion in mind and heart which we observe in the progress of chivalric and crusadal life, and based, as we must not forget, upon that Teutonic character, whose ancient deference to woman is recorded by Tacitus side by side with his account of knighting youthful soldiers with spear and shield.

But, to waive the question of its origin, we find its main expression in the old society, in that protracted and conventional wooing which, we should remember, was not usually directed toward marriage. As gentlemen grew hyperbolical and fantastic in their professions of regard and devotion, feminine coquettishness and love of admiration naturally became fastidious and exacting. Ladies grew arbitrary and capricious, and began to demand substantial proofs of their lovers' concern for them. It became a trait of elegant culture for a lady to pose as inexorable, while still retaining her control over the wooer; while he, complaisant to the sentimental fashion, sighed in a cheerful melancholy, obeyed, adored, and waited. The mistress set tasks, often no trifles, which the loyal subject must perform--hard feats of arms, long and perilous journeys, abnegations of pride or comfort. When these were accomplished, he sometimes returned to receive a new test, involving a continued delay of his reward. These mediaeval ladies were as pitiless as the mystic spiritual dictatress of Browning's _Numpholeptos_, to their devotees:

"Seeking love
At end of toil, and finding calm above
Their passion, the old statuesque regard."

In the fourteenth century something of this romantic tyranny survived. We find Chaucer, for instance, in one of his early poems, mentioning in praise of his heroine that she did not impose dangerous expeditions to distant countries, or extravagant exploits upon her lover:

"And saye, 'Sir, be now ryght ware
That I may of you here seyn
Worshippe, or that ye come agayn.'"

Extended probations, courtships long enough to satisfy Ruskin, were an established convention. Wolfram von Eschenbach, in the seventh book of _Parzival_, represents Obie as indignantly telling her royal lover, who has asked her to marry him after what seems to him a reasonable love-making, that if he had spent his days for five years, in hard service, under full armor, with distinction, and she had then said "Yes" to his desire, she would be yielding too soon.

Jane Austen, in the novel to which Trollope gave the palm of English fiction before _Henry Esmond_, has expressed in Mr. Collins's address to Elizabeth exactly the notion of the significance in a rejection, held by well-bred gentlemen six centuries earlier:

"'I am not now to learn,' replied Mr. Collins, with a formal
wave of the hand, 'that it is usual with young ladies to
reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to
accept, when he first applies for their favor; and that
sometimes the refusal is repeated a second or even a third
time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have
just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere
long.'"

But these exercises, as was suggested, were not usually directed toward the altar. A characteristic of the age is the relation, less or more sentimental, between a married knight and a lady not his wife; a relation rather expected of the former, and countenanced in the latter. This peculiar dual system of domestic and knightly love may be ascribed to various influences, such as the prosaic influence of early and dowered marriages, subject to parental arrangement, or the feudal life which for considerable periods kept gentlemen away from their own homes in residence in the larger castles, or the idleness of such a society, or again the popularity of love-lyrics and romance-recitals, which would tend to sentimentalize their audience. At any rate, it came to be a fashionable idea that the highest love was independent of marriage, and the most poetically inclined,--the troubadours and the minnesingers--were famous for their impassioned and submissive service of married ladies. It is from these poets' accounts of their own love-trials that we learn most about this phase of mediaevalism, and in their contented sufferings we see once more that the joy of all romantic love is in the lover.

Although there is danger of generalizing too widely from literary indications, we may believe that chivalric society was appreciably marked by formal amatory disciplines. Was it all for nothing these ceremonial disciplines? Can it be that these Don Quixote prototypes, who trifled away their frivolous days in lady-worship so trivial, did anything to help the Prince to take Cinderella from the ashes? The ashes, then the fairy coach; first the drudge, then the sentimental plaything, then at last the friend. In those days, as perhaps always, the lover objectified himself in his love, to the extent of finding in her his own _ideal feminine_. The very fact that this self, which he probably called into conscious life only as he created it in another, represented the most refined side of his thought, as is shown in the old poets' recurrent epithets of "constant, chaste, good," etc., made the devotion a refining and dignifying experience, especially for the days when men and women had less in common than they have now. These lady-services, where the lover often was denied intimacy for a considerable time, kept up the illusion which the devotee himself may have half felt was sentimental and artificial. We may reply to little Peterkin that some good did come of it at last, even for the more commonplace of these servants of abstract womanhood. Even if the "visionary gleam" left no permanent illumination, the men were better for seeing it brightening through their darkness now and then. At its best, lady-loving gave the mediaeval knights consideration for women and a measure of gentleness. If it only stimulated some to fight hard, they would have fought anyway, and the motive was a shade less brutal than a directly selfish one.

But such an eccentric social idea, especially when the poetic exhilaration of its earlier hours has passed by, was sure to bring out extravagant sentimentalists, whose romantic sensibility with no check from practical judgment, ran wild steeplechases of nonsense. Such, for example, was the Provencal poet, Peter Vidal, one of the most famous troubadours, who carried his romantic infatuations so far that he became crack-brained. The name of one of his ladies was Lupa, Mistress Wolf; and if he had contented himself with assuming a wolfish device for his coat-of-arms, as he did, and having himself called Mr. Wolf, he would have done nothing very peculiar, for that age. But it occurred to him that it would be a graceful symbol to wear a wolf's skin, and after he had procured one which quite covered him, he got down on all-fours, and trotted through the street; and all went charmingly until one day, while he was exhibiting himself in this fashion about his lady's estate, a pack of dogs was deceived by the metaphor, and the allegorical lover was badly bitten before rescue arrived.

But the most detailed example of mediaeval gallantry is that presented in the work already mentioned, the autobiography of the thirteenth-century minnesinger, Ulrich von Liechtenstein. The poem is a prolix narrative of his amatory religion, extending through some sixteen thousand lines, and containing a large number of lyrics composed in the wooing of two ladies to whom he consecrated his literary and romantic life. We utterly tire of the commonplaces in which he praises them. We reflect that not a single specific incident is ever introduced to illustrate the inner character of either; the descriptions have no color, except in the heartlessness of the first beloved, whose virtue and humor alike Ulrich apparently misses. Yet this presumably undesigned caricature of the more poetic twelfth-century chivalric love gives important suggestions of the times, and Ulrich himself is a knight and a poet worth knowing.

The impression that his romance makes upon a modern reader is something like that of a beetle hovering above a lily. He played zany to the gentlemen of an early generation who had amused their leisurely lives by courtly lady-service; as he emulated their feats of sentimental gallantry, he stumbled and fell. The odd thing is that after each fall he called for his tables: "Meet it is I set it down." Undoubtedly many marvelled and admired, as they looked on: others marvelled and laughed. Perhaps he mistook the laughter for applause. It may be that the sound was lost in the applause of his own simple-minded complacency. But yet, though this gallant was born to a foolish horoscope, his life gained a good fortune denied multitudes who lived sensibly,--he saw the stars of his destiny, and he loved them. Their combination caused a silly career, yet individually they were admirable,--simplicity of nature, theoretical reverence for womanhood, patient love, regard for stately old usages. If defective eyesight makes a man fancy a burdock a rosebush, and if he tends and cherishes the absurd idealization,--at least, the man has a sentiment for roses.

The earliest fact which Ulrich has confided to us, is that in his childhood he used to ride about on sticks, in imitation of the knights, and while in that simple age he noticed that the poetry which people read, and the conversation of wise men which he overheard, kept declaring that no one could become a worthy man without serving unwaveringly good ladies, and that "no one was right happy unless he loved as dearly as his own life some one whose virtue made her fitly called a woman." Whereupon, he thought in his simplicity that since pure sweet women so ennoble men's lives, he, whatever happened, would always serve ladies. In such thoughts he grew up until his twelfth year, when he began a four or five years' term as page to a lady who was good, chaste, and gentle, complete in virtues, beautiful, and of high rank. She was destined to give Ulrich much trouble, and the lover's sweet solicitude began at once, as he started in his teens. For his constant attention found nothing in her but what was good and charming, and he feared--this boy of thirteen--that she might not care for him. His ups and downs of fortune are reported for us in the popular mediaeval form (used for example by Map, and one as late as by Villon), of a dialogue between his heart and his body. Heart is hopeful, but Body has the better wit. Yet even if she is too high-born to notice him, he will always serve her late and early, and in the interim between his childish page-waiting, and the bold knighthood to be his when he grows up, he gathers pretty summer flowers, and carries them to her. When she took them in her white hand, he was happy.

As the time came near for him to leave her household, the youth grew emotional: when at table water was poured over those lovely white hands, he transformed her finger-glass into a tumbler. A German dry-as-dust has laughed at Ulrich for this.

But the tender little Teutonic blossom could unfold its youth no longer in the sunshine of its lady-desire. The stern father appeared, and transferred the lover, his "grief showing well the power of love," to the service of an Austrian Margrave. "My body departed, but my heart remained"; and Ulrich pauses for a moment to point out the strangeness of the paradox. "Whenever I rode or walked, my heart never left her; it saw her at all times, night and day."

His new master was a knightly gentleman, professedly a lady-servant, and the lessons that Ulrich had caught as a child from the conversation in his father's hall were reinforced by this Margrave Henry. He was taught the best style of riding, the refinements of address to ladies, and poetical composition, and assured that whoever would live worthily must be a lady's true subject. "It adorns a youth--sweet speech to women.... To succeed well with them, have sweet words with true deeds."

After four years of such instruction, his father's death called him home to inherit his property, and he spent the three years that followed by tourneying in the noviciate of knighthood. At Vienna, in 1222, during the great festival in celebration of the marriage of Leopold's daughter, where five thousand knights were present, and tourneying and other entertainments of chivalry were mingled with much dancing, Ulrich made one of the two hundred and fifty squires who received their spurs. But the occasion was otherwise memorable to him, for here he saw his lady again. She recognized him, and told one of his friends of her pleasure at seeing become a knight one who had been her page when a little fellow. The mere simple foolish thought that she would perhaps have him for her own knight, as he tells us, was sweet and good, and put him in high spirits. Indeed this was all the contentment which the blushing young knight desired:

"Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in
dreams?"

Ulrich did not wake from his to do anything so practical as to speak face to face with her, but gaily rode off to a summer of adventure in twelve tournaments, wherein he invariably fared well, thanks to his devotion.

German sentiment has always shown a butterfly's sensibility to winter and rough weather, and with the last of autumn, Ulrich's spirit grows heavy. He longs to see his lady, he knows that now he would speak to her. There are no tourneys to distract him, and in care of heart he rose, lay down, sat, and walked. As it chanced, a cousin of his knew this only lovely one, and the taxing office of a lover's confidante fell heavily upon her, and remained for some years. After beating about the bush with her for a while, he confessed the truth, only to receive point-blank advice to give up so hopeless an aspiration. Never! on the contrary she must help him in his perseverance by visiting the lady and presenting her with a copy of the verses which Ulrich has been composing for her as a confession of his love. His cousin consented, but her mission resulted in a scornful rejection of the suit, softened by compliments upon the poem. He was advised to abandon his quest, for the lady seriously objected to his mouth. "Nothing but grim death can drive me from her; I will serve her all my life," he exclaimed. But he felt that the criticism upon his mouth was a fair one, and he determined to pay attention to it.

Poor Ulrich, with so much sentiment, yet with such physical deficiencies; with such correct perception of the use of lips, yet having such uninviting ones of his own. In one of his songs he tells us:

When a lady on her lover
Looks and smiles, and for a kiss
Shapes her lips, he can discover
Never joy so great; his bliss
Transcends measure:
O'er all pleasures is his pleasure.

But until he was quite in his twenties, his experience of this blessedness must have been of those

"By hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others";

for Ulrich confesses to the deformity of what he calls three lips; that is, a bad hare-lip.

But this protagonist of mediaeval Quixotism has energy and nerve, as well as sentiment. In spite of his cousin's dissuasions (this plain-minded lady tells him to take the body God has given him, instead of arrogantly improving upon his creation), Ulrich rides off to find the best surgeon in the country, and submit to an operation. But the doctor decides that the time of year is unsuitable; he must wait until winter is past, keep his three lips until May.

At last spring comes and Ulrich returns to the doctor. Upon the way he meets a page of his lady's, to whom he confides the purpose of his journey, and whose presence he secures as a witness. Early one Monday morning the surgeon received his patient, laid out his instruments before him, and produced several straps. At sight of the latter, martial dignity recoiled, and Ulrich refused to allow himself to be bound. It was to no purpose that he was told of the danger involved in even a twitch; he said with spirit that he came of his own will, and if anything happened amiss he alone would be to blame. Whereupon he sat calmly upon a bench, and without a tremor allowed the surgeon to "cut his mouth above his teeth and farther up. He cut like a master, I endured like a man."

Ulrich describes the discomfort which he experienced during the healing of the wound, in details which give an unpleasant notion of the methods of mediaeval surgery. As he was able to eat and drink scarcely anything, he wasted in flesh, and his only comfort was the thought of her for whom he had suffered. During the confinement, he composed another dancing song in her honor, which, after his recovery he entrusted to his cousin, who forwarded it with a letter of her own. Presently an answer came. The lady is to spend the next Monday night near by, in the course of a journey, and she will be very happy to see her friend's relative, and learn from himself how things are. Time changes the significance of letters, among other things. This lady-like note, which gave such a heart-leap to Ulrich's sentimental hope, interests scholars to-day as being the earliest prose letter in German.

On Tuesday morning, when Ulrich appeared at the chapel where the lady's chaplain was singing mass before her, she bowed without speaking. After the service she rode off, and Ulrich had found no chance to meet her. His cousin, however, told him that everything was favorable, and that the lady would allow him to ride with her that day. So he galloped off in gay spirits, and soon overtook the cavalcade. But alas for his self-possession; when he reaches her his head drops and he cannot find a single word. Another knight was riding with her. Ulrich's heart makes a speech to his body, reproaching it for cowardice; "If you go on without speaking to her now, she will never be good to you again." So he rides up to her and gets a sweet glance, but still he cannot speak. Heart nudges Body and whispers: "Speak now, speak now, speak now!" All through the day Body tries, he tries over and over, but he cannot. Alas, as a poet of his own day said:

"Mit gedanken wirt erworben niemer wibes kint:
. . . . . . .
Des enkan si wizzen niht."[5]

When they reach their lodging-place for the night, he wishes to assist the only one in dismounting, but she is not sufficiently flattered by his attentions to accept them; she says that he is sick and useless, and not strong enough to help her down. The attending gentlemen laugh merrily at that, and the ever sweet, constant, good, and so forth, as she slides from her horse, catches hold of Ulrich's hair, without any one's noticing it (however that can have been done), and pulls a lock out by the roots. "Take this for being afraid," she whispers; "I have been deceived by other accounts of you." Reproaching himself, and wishing God to take his life, he stood gawkily where she left him, absorbed in remorse for his awkwardness, until a knight admonished him to step aside and allow the ladies to go by to their rooms. Whereupon he rode off to his inn, and swore that he was ill.

As he tossed restlessly through the night, he talked with himself as usual, lamenting his birth, and assuring himself that should he live a thousand years he could never again be happy. "Not to speak one word to her! My worthlessness has lost my lady." But in the morning he rode up to her on the street. No silence this time: "Thy grace, gracious lady! Graciously be gracious to me. Thou art my joy's abiding place, the festival of my joys." Like many shy people, Ulrich talked fluently enough when he was once started, and he was only in the midst of his protestations when the lady interrupted him. "Hush, you are too young; ride on before me. Talking may hurt you, it never can help you. It would be amiss for others to hear what you are saying. Leave me in peace; you grow troublesome." Then she beckoned to another knight, and directed that she should never again be attended by less than two gentlemen.

It was in the book of lady-service that no repulse was a discouragement. "This morning," says the heroine in Bret Harte's parody of _Jane Eyre_, "this morning he flung his boot at me! Now I know he loves me." Ulrich rode off, thinking that he had met with good success in telling her a part of his love, before the interruption.

Another summer passed in tourneying, and during another winter he tried to amuse himself by making poetry for his lady. This time he sent her a more pretentious tribute, his first "Buechlein," a poem of some four hundred lines. Like most of its kind, it is formal, sentimentally prolix, and supplicatory, yet not without a certain pleasant interest. He begs her from the wealth of her loveliness to grant him some trifling favor which she never can miss:

What is worse the bloomy heath,
If a few flowers for the sake
Of a garland some one break?

He wishes it were himself that the messenger is about to deliver to her:

Little book, I fain would be,
When thou comest, changed to thee.
When her fair white hand receives
Thine assemblement of leaves,
And her glances, shyly playing,
Thee so happy are surveying.
And her red mouth comes close by,
I would steal a kiss, or die.

But the unsatisfactory manuscripts were returned at once. The lady told the bearer that she recognized the merit of the poetry, but she would have nothing to do with it. Like many poets of those days when monks and ladies constituted the educated classes, like his predecessor, the great master of high mediaeval romance, Ulrich could neither read nor write, and for such delicate personal affairs as correspondence with his lady he depended upon his confidential clerk. This confidant of his passion was absent when the "Buechlein" came back, but the eager eyes of the poet looked through the pages over which they had evidently wandered before he dismissed his labors to their fate, repeating the lines from memory as he looked over the characters which should interpret his loving patience to the lady who would not let him speak it to her; and as he looked, he detected an addition to what he had sent, an appendix of ten lines. The slighted letter found a home in his bosom, and for ten days he awaited his secretary's return. His happy hopes--those ten days were so cheerful. But when the little response was at last interpreted, away with hopes and cheerfulness. To make plainness trebly plain, his cruel correspondent had copied out three times the sentiment: "Whoever desires what he should not, has refused himself."

Summer again, and the lover has diversion in the sports of chivalry. Any one interested in the details of mediaeval tournaments will find in Ulrich's narrative a valuable and lively record of the tourney held at Friesach in 1224. His sense for material splendor is well shown by his full accounts of the costuming and tent equipments. The trustworthiness of the minor points may be questioned when we recall that the _Frauendienst_ was composed more than thirty years later, but as a sketch of thirteenth-century chivalry, no doubt it is accurate. The heralds running hither and thither, and shouting as they arranged for the contests, with their cries to "good gallant knights to risk honor, goods, and life for true women"; the squires crowding the ways, loud noise of drums, flute-playing, blowing of horns, great trumpeting,--we have the old picture, made vivid in English by Chaucer in the _Knight's Tale_, and by Tennyson.

Ulrich rode in disguise, prompted by the sentimentalist's self-consciousness, always delighted in attracting attention and making himself talked of. According to his own account, he did good hearty tourneying, breaking ten spears with one antagonist, seven with another, five with a third, six with a fourth, in a single day. The meeting continued for ten days, and Ulrich grows prolix in his particulars, though he is modest enough about his own exploits, pronouncing himself neither the best nor the worst of the participants. The accidents of jousting, through which many were left at Friesach with broken limbs and other injuries, and the misfortunes which compelled others to have recourse to the Jews for loans, did not disturb the musical contestant. At the end he rode cheerfully off to his cousin with another song for the same inattentive ear. She promised to report, as she sent it, that no one in the great tourney had excelled him.

This lyric is the poem by which modern German students of their old literature have been best pleased, and we shall hardly dissent from Scherer's commendation. For it is both a typical minnesong, in its treatment of nature and love, and also fortunate in its union of sentiment, force, finish, and a ring of personal meaning. Omitting two of its stanzas, it goes as follows:

Now the little birds are singing
In the wood their darling lay;
In the meadow flowers are springing,
Confident in sunny May.
So my heart's bright spirits seem
Flowers her goodness doth embolden;
For in her my life grows golden,
As the poor man's in his dream.

Ah, her sweetness! Free from turning
Is her true and constant heart;
Till possession banish yearning,
Let my dear hope not depart.
Only this her grace I'll pray:
Wake me from my tears, and after
Sighs let comfort come and laughter;
Let my joy not slip away.

Blissful May, the whole world's anguish
Finds in thee its single weal;
Yet the pain whereof I languish,
Thou, nor all the world, canst heal.
What least joy may ye impart,
She so dear and good denied me?
In her comforts ever hide me,
All my life her loving heart.

But elegant and tender as in the original these verses are, their object returned a slighting answer, and added that the messenger must not be sent again. People would come to have suspicions. Ulrich made another set of verses, and went off to another joust. There one of his fingers was seriously wounded, and in his anxiety to save it he offered a surgeon a thousand pounds for a cure. The treatment was unsuccessful, and, after showing a good deal of temper, he went to a new surgeon, on the way beguiling himself of his pain by composing another poem upon the old theme. But a shock was at hand; a friend divulged to him his closely kept secret. "This lady [still unnamed to us] is the May-time of your heart." What though this friend believed that the lady cared for him? "My head sank down, my heart sighed, my mouth was dumb," in terror lest it might be through his fault that the object of his devotion had been discovered. For secrecy was the first of a chivalric lover's virtues, even about the object of his passion. Yet the pain was not without compensation, inasmuch as this gentleman, who declared that he had already kept the secret for two years and a half, volunteered to make another appeal. So off to the home of the inexorable went anew the story of unflinching devotion, the loss of a finger in a tournament for her glory not unmentioned. Ulrich's cause was pleaded with fervor, and in winning style. The lover was praised and prayed for. The song he had sent was even sung, instead of being formally delivered. A faithful and versatile legate was this proxy wooer, but it was all to no purpose. The lady declared that she would grow old in entire ignorance of any love but her husband's. She warned the messenger that Ulrich would find himself in trouble if he should persist in annoying her with such sentimental folly; she would not receive such attentions from the highest-born--not even from a king.

The news saddened, but did not cast down. "What if she refuses me?" cried Ulrich; "that shall not disturb me. If she hates me to-day, I will serve her so that later she shall like me. Were I to give up for a cold greeting, could a little word drive me away from my high hope, I should have no sound mind or manly mood. Whatever the true, sweet one does to me, for that I must be grateful." But now another summer was over, and he diverted himself by a pilgrimage to Rome. After Easter he returned, on his way composing this sweetly conceived and rather pretty lyric:

Ah, see, the touch of spring
Hath graced the wood with green;
And see, o'er the wide plain
Sweet flowers on every spray.
The birds in rapture sing;
Such joy was never seen:
Departed all their pain,
Comfort has come with May.

May comforts all that lives,
Except me, love-sick man;
Love-stricken is my heart,
This drives all joys away.
When life some pleasure gives,
In tears my heart will scan
My face, and tell its smart;
How then can pleasure stay?

Vowed constantly to woo
High love am I; that good
While I pursue, I see
No promise of success.
Pure lady, constant, true,
The crown of womanhood,
Think graciously of me,
Through thy high worthiness.

The knight passed his summer in Steierland under arms, and after pleasant experiences he sent his messenger again, only to have his suit repelled with the same coldness and decision as before. The report was even more discouraging, for the lady, who had been told of his losing a finger in her service, had now learned that he still had it; nor was she moved by the assurance that it was almost useless. The desire to keep the wounded member had led him to large expense of money and time, but he cared for it no longer. He set about the composition of another long elegy, which explains how his heart loves her, and weeps for her favor, as a poor and orphaned child weeps after comfort; so ardently he loves her, that he gladly sacrifices anything, and as a pledge of his constant fidelity, he sends her one of his fingers, lost in that service for which it was born.

After the poem was ready, he directed a goldsmith to make a fine case, in which he enclosed it. But he put in something more; he had the convalescent finger amputated, and sent it to the chiding critic as a proof that he had not lied in saying that he had lost it for her. Yet even this failed to please so unsympathetic a mistress. She said she wondered how any one could be so foolish as to cut off his finger: he would have been able to serve ladies better by keeping it. However, she would retain the token of his consideration, but a thousand years of his service would be lost on her. Ulrich was jubilant, for he was confident that with this memento, she would always think of him.[6]

Now a large idea visits this sanguine gentleman. Gone to Rome on a pilgrimage, that is what he will pretend; he rigs himself out with a wallet and staff which he obtains from a priest, and trudges off. But something more novel and magnificent is haunting his ingenious mind. It is to Venice that he goes--cautiously, so as not to be observed. Upon his arrival, he takes lodgings in an out-of-the-way inn, so that no one may hear of him. There he spends the winter, making a liberal expenditure for costumes for himself and a retinue. He dresses himself as Queen Venus, in complete feminine attire, even to the long braids of hair which figure so prominently in the descriptions of the ladies of that age.

When spring came, he sent a courier over the route that he intended to take on his journey homeward, with a circular-letter that contained a list of thirty places at which Lady Venus would appear, and joust with all contestants. A ring which makes beautiful and keeps true love, was offered to whoever might break a spear against her. If she should cast a knight down, he should become a loyal knight to women everywhere; if he were to overthrow her, she would give him her horse. But to no one would she show her face or hand.

Thirty days later he started on his disguised errantry. His retinue consisted of a marshal, a cook, a banner-bearer, two trumpeters, three boys to take charge of three sumpters, three squires for the three war-steeds, four finely dressed squires, each holding three spears, two maids--good-looking, he tells us,--and two fiddlers.

Who raised my spirits, fiddling loud
A marching tune, which made me proud.

Behind these he rode himself, dressed, like the entire cavalcade, entirely in white,--cape, hood, shirt, coat reaching to his feet, embroidered silk gloves, and those hair-braids hanging to his waist. "In my love-longing heart, I rejoiced thus to serve my lady."

The narrative of this "Venus-journey" is prolonged, detailed, and tedious, and only two or three episodes need be mentioned. At Treviso, a crowd of women are gathered about his lodging, when he comes out on his way to early mass, and he takes comfort in thinking how well-dressed he is. In the church, a countess suggests kissing him, conformably to the kiss of peace custom; the attraction is stronger than the desire for disguise, and he lifts his veil. She sees that Lady Venus is a man, but she kisses him nevertheless. "That raised my spirits," Ulrich confides to us, "for a lady's kiss is delightful"; and he goes on to say that "every one who ever kissed a lady's mouth knows that nothing is so sweet as the kiss of a noble lady. A high-born true woman who has a red mouth and a fair body, whenever she kisses a man he can judge of a lady's kiss, and of it he is ever glad. A lady's kiss is still better than good, and it fills a heart with joy." No wonder that many ladies collected at his inn, to bid so sentimental a knight God-speed. From their prayers he assures us that he gained good fortune, "for God cannot slight ladies' petitions," an imputation of gallantry to God, for which we find curious mediaeval parallels.

Wherever the knight goes, numerous contestants are awaiting him, in this idle age when no one had anything to do. Some of these, also, assume disguises, one as a monk, another in female costume, his shield and spear aesthetic with flowers. But the travelling combatant is always the winner. At one point during the journey he steals off for a couple of days to a place which he has never mentioned previously: namely, to his home. The love-stricken lady-servant speaks with the most unaffected simplicity of the joy with which he rode away to see his wife:

"Who was just as dear to me as she could be.... The good
woman received me just as a lady should receive her very dear
husband. I had made her happy by my visit. My arrival had
taken away her sadness. She was glad to see me, and I was
glad to see her; with kisses the good woman received me. The
true woman was glad to see me, and joyously I took my ease
and pleasure there two days."

This appears tautological, but it also seems sincere.