Chapter IV: Part 4

"Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been fill'd with flowers;
And ye the walks have been,
Where maids have spent their hours."

The dance is under way now; if, as sometimes happened, they paid a surprise visit, the guests have taken hold and made the room ready:

Clear out the benches and stools;
Set in the middle
The trestles, then fiddle;
We'll dance till we're tired, merry fools.
Throw open the windows for air,
That the breeze
Softly please
The throat of each child debonair.
When the leaders grow weary to sing,
We'll all say,
"Fiddler, play
Us the tune for a stylish court-fling."

(They apparently piled the table-frames in the middle of the room in place of the linden, about which they danced on the lawn.)

The singer goes on to remind them of the preparation for the party:

"I advise my friends to consult where the children shall have their fun. Megenwart has a large room: if it like you all, we will have the holiday party there. His daughter wishes us to come. All of you tell the rest. Engelmar shall lead a dance around the table."

Again: "Let Kunegunde know; we shall be blamed if no one tells her about it, and don't forget Hedwig." Once more: "Come along, children, to the farm-house at Hademuot's; Engelbrecht, Adelmar, Friderich, Tuoze, Guote, Wentel, and her sisters all three; Hildeburg, pretty child; Jiutel and her cousin Ermelint."

Still again, in one of the cheerful early songs, before Neidhart's bitter tone came in:

"Now for the children who've been asked to the party. Jiutel
shall tell them all, that they are to step after the fiddle
with Hilde. 'Twill be a great dance. Diemuot, Gisel, are
going together; Wendel, too, Engelmuot, for Heaven's sake! go
out and call Kuenze to come.

"Tell her the man is here; if she cares to see him, as she
has all the time been wishing to, let her put on a little
jacket and her cloak; I should prefer to have her come here,
than to have him find her there at home in her every day
clothes.

"Kuenze tarried then no longer, but came, as Engelmuot bade
her. She was in a hurry; quickly she dressed. Both sides of
her gown were red silk. The finest of girls! No one could
discover through the country, one I should be so glad to give
my dear mother for a daughter.

"Haha! How she pleased me, when I saw what she was; such
hair, and red lips. Then I asked her to sit by me, but she
said: 'I don't dare; I've been told not to talk with you, or
even sit by you. Go and ask Heilke over there by Vriderune!'"

"I hear dancing in the room," he sings at another time; "a crowd of village women are there; two fiddles; when they pause, gay outbreak of talking and laughing. Through the window goes the hubbub. Adelber never dances but between two girls." Sometimes the knightly guest entered into the gay interlude of conversation, entertaining a merry screaming group. But when his moody vein, or vexation at some common man's successful rivalry, dulled his social spirits, he would stand apart, or go to one side with one of the peasant maids, and satirically note the men scattered over the room. The young farmer's assumption of the dress and manners of gentility, carrying arms, discarding rustic fashions, affecting polite speech ("_Mit siner rede er vlaemet_," Neidhart says of one of them,--he talks like a fine gentleman from abroad),--all this was ridiculous to the courtly poet, and his sense of the humor of it was associated with the bitterness of social contempt. "Look at Engelmar, how high he holds his head. What elegant style he has, at the dance, with his showy sword; something different from his father Batze. His son is a poor gawk, with his rough head. He puffs himself out like a stuffed pigeon, that sits crop-full on a corn-chest." And again: "Did you ever see so gay a peasant as he is? Good Lord! he is first of all in the dance. His sword-band is two hands broad. Proud enough he, of his new jacket; it has four and twenty small pieces of cloth in it, and the sleeves come down over his hand."[8] "There are two peasants wearing coats in the court style, of Austrian cloth. Uoze never cut them."

Then he goes on to say:

"Perhaps you would like to hear how the rustics are dressed.
Their clothes are above their place. Small coats they wear,
and small cloaks; red hoods, shoes with buckles, and black
hose. They have on silk pouch-bags, and in them they carry
pieces of ginger, to make themselves agreeable to the girls.
They wear their hair long, a privilege of good birth. They
put on gloves that come up to their elbows. One appears in a
fustian jacket green as grass. Another flaunts it in red.
Another carries a sword long as a hemp flail, wherever he
goes; the knob of its hilt has a mirror, that he makes the
girls look at themselves in. Poor clumsy louts, how can the
girls endure them? One of them tears his partner's veil,
another sticks his sword hilt through her gown, as they are
dancing, and more than once, enthusiastically dancing and
excited by the music, their awkward feet tread on the girls'
skirts and even drag them off. But they are more than clumsy,
they have an offensive horse-play kind of pleasantry that is
nothing less than insult. They put their hands in wrong
places, and one of them tries to get a maiden's ring, and
actually wrenches it from her finger as she is treading the
bending _reie_.

"Why should I not be angry at his insolence? Yet I would not
mind the ring so much, if he had not hurt her hand."

And just so, Engelmar snatched her mirror from Neidhart's darling Vriderune.

This last, as has been said, is the most famous incident in the Neidhart story. From it he dates all his misfortunes, and he reverts to it, over and over, with bitterness that can hardly be regarded as merely ironical humor. Yet numerous as the references are, there is a mystery about the affair that has not been cleared up. It has been suggested that Vriderune's way of taking the rudeness made it clear to Neidhart that it was her peasant lover, and not himself, whom she really liked, but it would seem more natural to associate the occurrence with something violent. Possibly the poet's indignation at the boorish familiarity led him to a personal attack, just as in another connection he threatens to strike an obnoxious fellow, and the resulting quarrel may have been taken up by friends of both, with such serious consequences that various annoyances followed on their part, which he could only return by insulting hits in his songs. The chances are all in favor of the poet's having been a slighter man physically than these farm-workers, at one of whom he sneers for the sacks that ride on his neck, and there are suggestions in the pseudo-Neidhart poetry of his having had helpers to a revenge. In one of these imitations it is said that through Neidhart's injury thirty-two had their left legs cut off, an evident exaggeration of an earlier imitation, where the writer reminds his hearers of what happened to Engelmar for taking Vriderune's mirror, that he lost his left leg and had to go on crutches. Such violent fights are authentically reported at merrymakings of the time, and as the aristocratic leader of such a brawl, Neidhart no doubt would find his subsequent residence among the peasants uncongenial. Yet why should he manifest such reserve, at the same time that he mentions the subject so constantly, referring to it long after he has left Bavaria? Is it possible that his jealousy and hot blood drove him to some underhanded attack in some such way as that in which a brilliant restoration poet tried to punish a supposed injury? This ill reputation as an aristocrat equally insolent and treacherous, might follow him to Austria; he would hardly be pleased to acknowledge in his poem what he had done, while the constant references to his injury in the insult of Vriderune, and the misfortunes to himself which it caused may be regarded as half defensive attempts to excite sympathy instead of disapproval. So much for possible explanations of this curious literary enigma, out of which we may make too much; for, as I have already suggested, Neidhart may only be doing what novelists sometimes do when they repeat a popular hit in characterization. At any rate, Vriderune seems to have been lost to her upper-class lover, "and ever from that time I have had some new heart-sorrow."

Neidhart constantly reverts to the peasants' brutality and eagerness to fight. "Look out for a brutish fellow named Ber. He is tall and broad-shouldered; he scarcely can get in at the door. Fie, who brought him here? He is the nephew of Hildebolt of Bern, who was pounded by Williher." Lanze, again, "had got himself up for a champion, and thought nothing could resist him. He put underneath a coat of mail. Snarling like a bear he goes; so ugly is he, one were a child who withstood him." And of another: "He wears a sword that cuts like shears, and a good safety hat. Whoever you are, you may well keep out of his way. Villagers, look out for him; his sword is poisoned. It's a well-tempered Waidover, that sword of his."

With such village-warriors, no wonder that the parties did not always end cheerfully. With a resemblance to modern slang Neidhart tells how they threaten to put sunshine through each other. The lively episode of a quarrel over a rural gallant's presenting a young lady with a piece of ginger, Neidhart says he cannot describe in full, for he came away. But "each began screaming to his friends; one called loudly: 'Help, gossip Wezerant.' He must have been in great difficulty to scream so for help. I heard Hildebolt's sister shriek: 'Oh, my brother, my brother!'" Another dance ends with a milder disagreement. "Ruoprecht found an egg--'I ween the devil gave it to him'--and threatened to throw it. Eppe got mad, and dared him. Ruoprecht threw it at the top of his head, and it trickled down over him." Sometimes, evidently, peacemakers interfered, as they did in Frideliep's and Engelmar's disagreement about Gotelint, so that the rivals did not fight, though "just like two silly geese they went toward each other, all the rest of the day."

Like all of those poets, Neidhart, though he says "I" very often, lets us become but indifferent acquaintances. We read some of the mediaeval lyrists without feeling sure that we detect a single genuine personal note; they had little of our modern sense of individuality. With Neidhart we fare better than with most; yet, after all, we are hardly sure that some of his personal confessions are not formally or humorously assumed. Yet of one trait we are left in no doubt, his strong German sense for the fatherland. With many other Bavarians, he went to Syria and Damietta on the crusade of 1217-1219, led by Leopold VII. of Austria, and he has left us two songs which, though certainly different enough from the deep religious feeling of such crusade lyrics as Hartmann's or Walther's, are unmistakably sincere. The first opens with the minnesinger's usual spring and love-lorn stanzas, but Neidhart soon drops conventionality with the exclamation, "For my song the foreign folk here do not care: ah, blessings on thee, Germany!" It reminds us of Walther: nothing is like the German home. He thinks of sending a messenger, not we notice, to some town or castle, but to that village where he left the loving heart from which his constancy never wavers, and to the dear friends over-sea.

"Tell them from us all that they should quickly see us there,
joyous enough, except for these wide waves. Bear my glad
service to my mistress, dear to me before all ladies, and say
to friends and kinsmen that I am well. If they inquire how
things are going with us pilgrims, tell them, dear boy, what
ill these foreign folk have wrought us. Haste thee, be swift;
after thee assuredly shall I follow, quick as ever I may. God
grant we may live to see the happy day of going home."

"We are all scarcely alive," he goes on; "the army is more than half dead. Ah, were I there! By my beloved gladly would I rest, in mine own place." "If I may only grow old with her!" he cries, and he breaks out impatiently against those who keep delaying through August, instead of moving westward. "Nowhere could a man be better off than at home, in his own parish."

At last the expedition, dissatisfied and worn, as the returning crusaders always were, are on the confines of the longed-for country. We can imagine the straggling company making their way along, their minstrel riding among them, fingering the old violin that he has carried over his shoulders all the two years, and thinking out a new song. He is still a young man, or at least only approaching middle age, and thoughts of home, friendship, love, and the spring gaiety of the village life, crowd upon him with buoyant thrills; he strikes the strings more firmly, and his voice rings out a home-coming lyric, full of life and feeling. "The long bright days are come again, and with them the birds; it is a long time since they sang so well. The winter-weary are gayer than they have been for thirty years. Maidens, ye children, fine people all, let your hearts be free to the summer joy, spring quickly in the carols."

Dear herald, homeward go;
'Tis over, all my woe;
We're near the Rhine!

Neidhart's poems are readily classified in two divisions, his songs for summer and for winter. Both were probably sung as an accompaniment to the dances, either of the peasants or of the upper class, though there may be some doubt whether this is true of all the winter songs. Almost invariably he opens with a nature-prelude, often an elaborate one, and the temper of the songs is always congenial to the season, gay for summer, and gloomy or critical for winter.

There is no evidence that the difficulty with Engelmar was the occasion of the poet's leaving Bavaria, but his unpopularity with the peasants seems to have had something to do with the loss of his fief. He was cast down at the thought of parting with Reuenthal, and said that he would sing no longer, since the name under which his merry lines had been known was taken from him; and with a play on the word, "I am put out undeservedly, my friends; now leave me free of the name!" But after he was settled by Frederich on an Austrian fief, he adapted himself cheerfully to his new home. "Here I am at Medelicke, in spite of them all. I am not sorry that I sang so much of Eppe and of Gumpe at Reuenthal."

The Duke gave him money and a house, in response to musical solicitations, and Neidhart appealed for exemption from his heavy taxes, that threatened to consume what his children needed. With our modern ideas this system of literary patronage upon which mediaeval poets depended, and which usually required direct and even pressing solicitation, seems painful to self-respect; we forget how lately it flourished. In those days when princely giving was an established custom, and differed from a system of salaries mainly in being a less regularly appointed income, a poet's request for a gift was scarcely more than a modern author's reminder of an unpaid claim; there is nothing of the unmanly dependence of Coleridge in these earlier suppliants for aid. None of them asked more gracefully--even Chaucer is not more delicately suggestive--than Neidhart in such lines as these:

"Whoever had a bird who satisfied him with song through the
year, he would occasionally look to his bird-cage, and give
him good food. Then the bird could go on singing sweet
melodies. If he always sang well to meet the May, he should
be well cared for, summer and winter. Even the birds
appreciate kind treatment."

But the times were bad, and even a box of silver, and a house to put it in, and remission of taxes, could not keep the poet gay as he passed into later life. He composed penitential lyrics, after orthodox precedents, of the love-singers, for they almost always grew old seriously. On these we need not linger, though there seems a cry fuller than the echo-note in his farewell to Lady Earth, and appeal for pardon for some of his foolish songs: "Lord God of Heaven, give me thy guidance; Might of all Might, now strengthen my heart, that I may win soul's health, and partake ever-enduring joy, through thy sweet will." But the wail of all of the thirteenth-century's serious minds, that things were going "ever the lenger the wers" in Christendom, comes out nowhere more deeply than in Neidhart's allegorical love-song to Joy of the World, chiding her for her change of character during his long, unrequited service:

"False, shameless folk nowadays people her court, and her old
household, truth, chastity, good manners, none find these any
longer. My lady's honor is lame all over. She is fallen so
that none can rescue her. She lies in such a pool that only
God can make her clean. Men of wise mind be on your guard
before her, in church or on street: women of worth keep far
away."

Eighty new melodies he has sung in her service; this is the last, and not the most joyous.

To this closing period we may refer a few summer songs that are an exception to the usually light-hearted verses of that form. Their seriousness is all the more noticeable from their fair-weather setting; for once, the spring is not a panacea. "A delightful May has come, but alas, neither priest nor layman rejoices in its arrival. Were it the Emperor who had come, we might rejoice. Trouble and sorrow dwell in Austria." There is something here besides a sense that the joyousness of simple free-living and the loyalty of love-service are passing away; he attributes much of the social decline to national confusion and the political unrestraint. Yet controversial as he is in social relations, he has little of Walther von der Vogelweide's thoughtfulness and energy in patriotic polemics. He drifts down the stream with a sigh.

In the poem which Meyer's elaborate study of the order of his work places last, though only conjecturally, he again considers his friends' entreaty for more songs. The world goes too sadly, he says; as he had said before that they must ask Troestelin to sing; he himself had no longer a heart for poetry. Yet there is one pleasant story that he can tell them: "to break down troubles comes one worthy to be praised; 'tis May, with all his might." There is something pathetic in such songs, that try to assume the cheerful strain in which the poet, now grown gloomy, wrote while he was young. They remind us of the stray leaves that we sometimes see caught up to their old home among the branches by a sudden March gust; the brown leaves that will never again uncrumple their green infancies, hover for a moment, then sink hesitatingly back to the ground. In this one song, the nature stanzas are transferred from the place of prelude to the conclusion. "May has conquered; wood and heath have adorned themselves with their lovely attire; blue flowers are here and the roses," and he ends with the old thought, that joyousness and virtuous honor go together. As an idle fancy it is "pleasant if one consider it," to regard these as the final words of this knightly singer of mediaeval country scenes, the last of the great figures of that old German group, a parting reminder of the philosophy of a happy life which mediaeval lyrists often maintained so earnestly,--that the secret of good living is blitheness of heart, and out-of-door life in spring and summer. For many of these old poets the two terms were convertible; their creed was surely a simple one.

[Decoration]

FOOTNOTE:

[8] We must remember that the unwillingness of the upper grade of society to have peasants assume its styles of dress, went so far that ducal edicts were issued forbidding them to use coats of mail and helmets, or to carry any weapons. Bitter complaints were made of their wearing any stuffs so fine as silk, and clothes stylishly cut.

[Decoration]

MEIER HELMBRECHT,

A GERMAN FARMER OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.

The usual conception of the middle ages seems to consist of a few facts and theories about the feudal system and the crusades, the names with possibly some traits of a few eminent public figures and a general impression of confusion and obscurity. Supplementing this central idea, one usually sees a panel picture on either side. One, sunshine flashing from the spears and armor of knights tilting in tournaments, and watched by dimly beautiful women; in the distance a solitary knight pricking over a plain, or, guided by the wail of an unseen and lovely captive, making his way through forest haunts of giants and gnomes. The other, a lowering twilight overhanging gloomy monastery walls, the shelter of melancholy, hypocrisy, manuscript illuminations, and a barren, difficult philosophy. Sunshine and twilight on either hand, and in the background an impenetrable mist concealing the great masses of humanity, as well as all concrete actual lives even of the great. A little information and a little romance are unsatisfactory artists for a sketch of mediaevalism. We soon discover that there is a great deal behind such a picture of soldiers living in wars, and in the tourneying pretence of war; or schoolmen contending in brilliant logical panoply within and without spectral philosophic fastnesses; or hermits, nuns, and monks fighting against God's present that they might win His future; or marauders beating down helplessness and innocence.

Yet we may study the middle ages laboriously, and find ourselves still confronted by the mist that hangs over the rank and file. Our curiosity about these forgotten multitudes teases us. "How is it that you lived, and what is it that you did?" we ask these distant prototypes of Wordsworth's peasant. We come to discover that there is much behind our slight old notion of chivalry and monasticism; though seven hundred years have changed its conditions, life then and now is yet less different than we had thought. But we find it difficult to acquire much information about those social substrata on which the learned and the polite classes rested. Clio is the most aristocratic of the ladies nine, and that instinct of vitality whereby we count fame for ourselves something desirable, makes us think with a certain compassion of great armies of those generations filing sullenly on, not only as individuals, but as whole masses, to the grave of oblivion. The little that we know makes us sure only that they were wretched, their lives the most gloomy of all the lives of gloomy ages.

We may read thousands of pages of the literature of those days with scarcely any addition to our knowledge of the work-a-day world, for most of the poetry is romantic, and in its imitative phases mainly a reflection of courtly customs and character. The middle ages in Germany and France were anything but uncivilized, and the poetry of secondary cultivation is, as was said in the last essay, likely to prefer idealistic interpretation of its finest development to democratic realism. Yet the student finds from time to time interesting material for an account of the average life, and in the poet whom this essay is designed to introduce to a modern audience, we obtain an extended study in this side field of literary interpretation. He wrote not of high life but of the middle classes, not in romance but in a literal yet at the same time artistic manner that we may call a heightened realism. He appears to have been himself one of the people, a poet who possibly made his living by reciting poems of incident, and by singing at their merrymakings, though of this there is no evidence. It has been thought by some German scholars that he may have been a monk, but the indications make rather against than for this view. We know in fact nothing whatever about him except for one single line, in which he tells us that his name is Wernher the Gardener.

As was said, his poem is remarkable as being the heightened treatment of a plain story of the peasant classes a little before 1250; it is remarkable, too, for the liveliness and simple force of his treatment. He is an artist--though he works in chalks instead of water-colors;--unornamented, unassuming, he produces an impression of personal power, moral seriousness, a clear eye for what he saw, and the power to state it directly, one of the marks of a later and more developed age. He has no little dramatic liveliness, a sense of humor, and the pleasantest love for the plain beauties of character and home-life.

He tells the story of a farmer, Helmbrecht, and his wayward son. The boy has been the admiration of his peasant family as the oldest child, notable for his splendid yellow hair, and full of life and spirit. At the time the poem opens he has grown to early manhood, dissatisfied with the hidden and laborious life of tiller of the soil, vain of his appearance, fond of fine dress, and ambitious to live easily and be admired. He is petted and indulged by his mother and his sister Gotelint, and when he desires a hood--a part of masculine costume much affected by gallant youths--they provide him with one so fine that it becomes famous far and near. Embroidery, as every one knows who is acquainted with the mediaeval arts, was the most artistic accomplishment of the period. Ladies learned to embroider and weave the most complicated and elaborate devices; handicraftsmen of all sorts put on their work representations so copious that one sometimes wonders whether the literary descriptions of them are not exaggerations. Can the frequency and detail of these passages, we wonder, be a faintly remembered tradition of the devices put by Homer on the shield of Achilles, or by Vergil on the gates of the rising Carthage? At any rate, tapestries, cloths, and garments, to say nothing of saddles and the like, were covered by picture after picture, in almost every important poem of the age. This young peasant Helmbrecht's hood was embroidered, not, of course, by the rude country fingers of his mother and sister, but by a clever nun, who had run away from her nunnery to enjoy the pleasures of a lively youth. Many were the wages of farm-produce by which she was persuaded to fit out the young man. The hood was covered with birds, parrots, and doves; on one side were representations of the siege of Troy and the escape of AEneas; on the other, the stout deeds of Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver, in their wars against the heathen Moors. Behind, adventures of old German legendary heroes, in the cycle of Dietrich of Bern. In front, dances of knights, ladies, and of maidens and young esquires--the favorite and mediaeval dance, where the gentleman stood between two ladies, holding the hand of each.

After this acquisition the boy became ambitious for still more finery, and was indulged in an elaborate costume that need not be described. Such white linen, such a splendid blue coat, all covered with buttons, gilded ones in double rows down the back, around the collar, and in front of silver. About the shoulders little bells were hung, that rang merrily when he sprang in the _reie_. Ah, very love-lorn were the glances cast on him by women and girls at the dance.

At last he is fully equipped by the love and sacrifice of his family, and they are happy in his elegance, and contented with themselves because the self-willed and capricious boy is pleased; when suddenly the simple household is thrown into grief and anxiety by his announcement that he is going to leave home. He must have a horse--there was none on the farm--to complete his outfit as a gentleman, and then he will ride away to some court and seek his fortune. In vain they remonstrate.

"'My dear father, help me on. My mother and sister have
helped me so that I shall love them all my life.'

"His father was troubled to hear that he was resolved to go,
but he said to him: 'I'll give you a fast horse for your
outfit, good at hedges and ditches, for you to have there at
court. I'll buy him for you willingly, if I can find one for
sale. But, my dear son, now give up going to court. The ways
there are hard for those who have not been used to them from
the time they were children. My dear son, now drive team for
me, or if you'd rather, hold the plough, and I'll drive for
you, and let us till the farm, so you'll come to your grave
full of honors like me; at least I hope to, for I surely am
honest and loyal, and every year I pay my tithes. I have
lived my life without hate and without envy.'

"But the son replied: 'My dear father, keep quiet and stop
talking; there's only one way about it, I'm going to find out
how things smack there at court. Your sacks sha'n't load my
back any longer. I won't load any more manure on your wagon,
and God hate me if I ever yoke oxen for you again, and sow
your oats. That's not the thing for my long yellow hair and
my curly locks, and my close-fitting coat, and my fine hood,
and the silk doves the women worked on it. I won't help you
farm any longer.'

"'Dear son, stay with me. I am certain that farmer Ruoprecht
will give you his daughter, with lots of sheep and swine, and
ten cattle, old and young. At court you'll be hungry, you'll
have to lie hard, and give up all comforts. Now take my
advice, and it will be to your interests and credit. It very
seldom happens that a man gets along well who rebels against
his own station. Your station is the plough. My son, I swear
to you that the genuine court-people will make fun of you, my
dear child. Do as I say, and give it up.'

"'Father, if I only have a horse I shall get on as well in
the court ways as those who were born there. Any one who saw
that hood on my head would swear a thousand oaths that I
never worked for you, or drove a plough through a furrow.
Whenever I put on the clothes my mother and my sister gave me
yesterday, I sha'n't look much as if I ever took a flail to
thresh wheat on the barn floor, or as if I ever drove stakes.
When I get my legs and my feet in the hose and cordovan
boots, nobody'll know that I ever made fence for you or any
one else. Let me have a horse, and farmer Ruoprecht may go
without me for a son-in-law. I'll not give up my future for a
wife.'"

The father goes on pleading with the boy to take advice and keep out of the disorderly life he is likely to get into about a court. By the silent assumption that his new master and his people will pillage from the peasantry, we get a suggestion of the lawlessness of the country--which had grown worse during the long absenteeism of Frederic II. But if the peasants catch you, he tells his son with energy, you will fare much worse than one of the gentlemen would. They will take the quickest revenge, and think that they are doing God service when they find one of their own kind stealing.

But the son only goes on to repeat that he will leave the farm. He talks just as an ambitious country fellow will talk to-day about the slow life and small profits. He becomes bolder and more insolent. If it were not for that wretched horse he would be riding with the rest across fields and dragging peasants through the hedges; the cattle would be lowing as he drove them off. He says he can endure poverty no longer;--raising a colt or an ox for three years, and then selling them for just nothing. So his father traded a large piece of homespun, four good cows, two oxen, three steers, and four bushels of wheat,--all worth about ten pounds,--for a horse that could not have been sold for three ("alas for the wasted seven!"), and the young man put on his finery, tossed his head, and, looking around, jauntily declared that he could "bite through a stone, or eat iron, he felt so fierce." If he could catch the Emperor or the Duke, there would be some money coming in. "'Father, you could manage a Saxon easier than me.'"

When he calls upon his father to release him from the family control, the latter assents, though with all his old reluctance. Indeed he cannot let him go without one more appeal:

"'I give you your liberty, my son. But take care that no one
yonder hurts your hood and its silk doves, or viciously tears
your long yellow hair. And I am afraid that at the end you
will be following a staff, or some little boy will be
leading you.'"

Then once more, after a pause, comes the abrupt:

"'My son, my own dear boy, give up going. You shall live on
what I live, and on what your mother gives you. Drink water,
my dear son, before you steal to buy wine. Austrian pie, any
one, fool or wise man, will tell you, is food fit for
gentlemen. Eat that, dear child, instead of giving an ox you
have stolen to some inn-keeper for a chicken. Your mother can
cook good broth; eat that, instead of giving a stolen horse
for a goose. My son, mix rye with oats sooner than eat fish
in a dishonored life. If you will not obey me, go. But though
you win wealth and great honors, never will I share them with
you. And misfortune--have that alone too.'

"'You drink water, father, but I'll drink wine. Eat your
mush, but I'll eat what they call fricasseed chicken there
and white wheat bread; oats will do for you. They say at Rome
that a child takes after his godfather, and mine was a
knight. Thank God for giving me such high and noble ideas.'"

But the old farmer replied that he liked much better a man who did right and remained constant to it.

"Even though his birth might be rather humble, he would
please the world better than a king's son without virtue and
honor. An honest man of lowly rank, and a nobleman who was
not courteous and honorable,--let the two come to a land
where neither is known, and the child of lowly birth will
outrank the high-born. My son, if you will be noble, on my
word I counsel you, do noble deeds. Good life is a crown
above all nobility."

There is the old thought, so common in literature from ancient authors down to the poet of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, and especially a favorite with writers of the middle age. Possibly some of them caught it from Boethius, who expressed it more than once in the testament of wise and generous character that he left to the world from his confinement at Pavia, and that proved so singularly congenial to the mediaeval mind; but we need certainly not require the aid of origins to account for its frequency. Aristocratic as many phases of the times were, there were a number of important evening influences, conspicuously two: the church, in whose monastery cloisters the rich and poor met together as brothers of one impartial discipline, and from whose ranks members of low birth might rise to be the peers of dukes; and the orders of chivalry, which received approved squires from the middle class. Thus, in addition to aristocracy of birth, there was a conditional gentility to which those who had the claim of merit might aspire. But though the thought that desert, and not descent, is the test for nobility, is so obvious in the days when position carried with it so strong a connotation of power, and when the upper strata of society bore down so hard and haughtily upon the lower, we always feel satisfaction in coming upon a trim statement of the fine old commonplace whose best mediaeval expression we can quote from a poet of our own language:

"Look, who that is moost vertuous alway,
Pryvee and apert, and moost entendeth ay
To do the gentil dedes that he kan,
Taak hym for the grettest gentil man."

"'Alas, that your mother bore you!'" the farmer exclaimed, when the boy's only answer to his appeal was to declare his hair and hood better fitted for a dance than for the plough or the harrow. "'Thou wilt leave the best and do the worst'"; and he goes on to contrast the man who lives against God and the good of others, followed by every one's curses, with the man who helps the world along, trying night and day to do good by his life, and thereby honors God. This one, wherever he may turn, has the love of God and all the world.

"'Dear son,' he says, 'that man you might be, if you would
yield to me. Till with the plough, and plenty of people will
be the better for your life, poor and rich; nay, even wolf
and eagle, and everything that lives on earth. Many a woman
must be made more beautiful through the farmer, many a king
must be crowned through the produce of the farm. Indeed,
there is no one so noble that his pride would not be a very
small thing, except for the farmer.'"

How natural all this sounds,--agriculture the basis of society, tillage of the soil alike useful and honorable. With what quiet manliness this old German talks of the dignity of labor, with no touch of the modern arrogance and discontent with the existing social condition. He will keep to his rank in life, and be loyal to his station, yet, though he looks up with a simple-hearted interest and wonder to the great world above him, he reflects as he follows his plough that without him that great world's pride "would be a very small thing." But there is a quality here that is still finer: the undercurrent perception of "the gospel of service." It is not only that honesty is the best policy, though the peasant is shrewd, and appreciates the practical side too; his conversation with the boy breathes the best nineteenth-century spirit of the duty of making one's life valuable to others. That sentence about working night and day to be useful, and thereby honoring God, is no commonplace for our century, to say nothing of the thirteenth. There is something pretty, too, in the touch of sympathy with the animal world; in some way, he feels that even the birds and beasts must be better off for a good farmer.

These times seem often savage in their cruelties and recklessness of giving pain, but they have a gentle side as well, as may be seen in the tales cited by Montalembert of friendly relations between monks and wild beasts, and in examples collected by Uhland in his essay on the old German animal literature. It is pleasant in connection with such barbarities as we shall presently be reminded of in this very poem to recall the myth versified by Longfellow, of the great minnesinger's legacy to the monastery, conditioned on the brethren's every day placing grain and water for the birds upon his grave; and more than one authentic story is told like that of the Abbot of Hirsan, who, when snow was deep in winter, would take oats from his barn to feed the birds.

After the young Helmbrecht has begged God to release him soon from his father's preaching,--"if you only had been a real preacher you might have got up a whole army with your sermons for a crusade,"--and has explained that instead of keeping on ploughing, he is resolved to have white hands, and no longer need to feel mortified whenever he holds ladies' hands at a dance, his father resorts to his last resource--an appeal to superstition, that he has been keeping in reserve. He tells him what he has been dreaming--three dreams that he interprets as ominous of the loss of sight, feet, and arms, and worst of all, a final dream of one of those sights so common for many centuries before and after, but made no less dreadful by familiarity.

"'You were hanging on a tree. Your feet were a fathom from
the ground. Above your head on a bough sat a raven, by its
side a crow. Your hair was all tangled. On the right hand the
raven combed your head for you, on the left the crow.'"

But the hopeful rode gaily off through the bars, and came to a castle where a warlike lord was glad to receive any addition to his force. There he stayed for a year, leading the extreme bandit life of whose outrages and oppressions we read so much during this troubled period. He quickly obtained reputation as daring and merciless:

"Into his sack he stuffed everything; it was all one to him.
Nothing was too small, nothing too great. Helmbrecht took it
all, rough and smooth, crooked and straight. He took horses,
cattle, jacket, sword, cloak, coat, goats, sheep. From women
he stripped everything, and well enough his ship went that
first year, 'its sails full.' But after a while, as people
are wont to think of going home, he took leave of the court,
and commended them to the good God."

They heard at the farm that he was coming on for a visit, and in accordance with the ancient custom of giving a present to the bearer of good news, the messenger received a shirt and pair of hose. But when the young man himself arrived, "how he was received! Did they step forward to meet him? Nay, they ran, all together; one crowded past another; father and mother sprang as if they had never had a care." It is touching to notice the suggestiveness of a single line in the poet's description of the scene. The plain people understood that their son was no longer one of them, and they knew how his earlier false pride must have grown in this year's absence in the outer world. So in their anxiety that everything should gratify this brilliant, wayward eldest son of their admiration and hope, and that nothing should interfere with his being pleased and gracious to their yearning, timid love, and knowing how in the homely heartiness of their joy at seeing their young master again the two servants would treat him at once in the old familiar way of peasant-farm equality, they instructed their man and their woman in what they thought to be polite salutation. So when the guest appeared, "Did the woman and the man cry 'Welcome back, Helmbrecht'? Nay, they did not; they had been told not to. They said: 'Master, in God's name be you welcome.'" There is a touch of humor in their rushing forward and being the first to greet him, in their rude good-feeling; but we also get a sense of tenderness from seeing the father and mother keeping in the background, behind their daughter Gotelint.

Little education as there was in the middle ages, people fully appreciated the elegance as well as the utility of a knowledge of foreign languages, and no accomplishment was held more desirable. Especially the Germans, representing an outlying civilization, would send their sons, while still boys, to some French court to serve as pages and acquire especially the language as well as other branches of knightly culture. The praises of various heroes of French as well as German romances, give to linguistic attainments a high place; Gottfried, for example, in his account of the training of Tristan, who was the typical gentleman of the romances, says that from the age of seven until he was fourteen he was studying languages under the care of a tutor, by travelling through different lands. Since this was the fashion, imitations were sure to become popular, and a thin veneering of foreign speech became the mark of a pinchbeck culture, just as it has been so frequently since. Accordingly, after the servants have cried out their "Master, in God's name be you welcome," and Gotelint has thrown her arms about her brother, the young gallant calls her his dear little sister in a phrase of salutation touched with Low Dutch, which he follows by the elegant "gratia vester." Then the younger children ran up, and last of all the farmer and his wife, who greeted him over and over. He addressed his father in French: "Deu sal"; his mother in Bohemian: "Dobraytra." They looked at each other; four strange languages all together--there must be some mistake.

"The housewife said: 'My dear, this is not our son. This is a
Bohemian or a Slav.' Her husband replied: 'It is a Frenchman.
My son whom I commended to God, certainly this is not he, and
yet he looks like him.' And Gotelint suggested: 'He answered
me in Latin; may be he is a priest.' 'Faith,' put in the
hired man, who had caught the phrase in dialect, 'he has
lived in Saxony or Brabant, for he said, "liebe
susterkindekin"; he must be a Saxon.'"

The old peasant was devoted and loving, but he had resolution and self-respect under it all. He told the accomplished youth that before he would take him for his son he must talk German. If he would do that and declare himself Helmbrecht, well and good. He should have a chicken boiled, and another roasted, and his horse should be well cared for. But a Bohemian, or a Slav, or a Saxon, or a Brabanter, or a Frenchman, or a priest, should be given nothing. The youth began to reflect. It was getting late, there was no place near by where he could go; so he concluded to waive his elegant manners, and speak in the old style. But the shrewd peasant feigns incredulity, and decides to test his son a little further. In vain the young man protests himself Helmbrecht. His gentility must stoop to vulgar peasant identification, and tell what he knows about the oxen on the farm. He rattles over all four of them, Grazer, Black-spot, Rascal, and White-star, with a little praise for two, and the reconciliation is accomplished. Thereupon the repressed fondness and devotion obtain free expression. The father hurried out to attend to the horse, the mother sent her daughter for a pillow and cushion--"Run, now, and don't walk for it"--and makes a couch for him on the bench close to the stove, so that he may have a nap while she is preparing his dinner. When the boy woke the meal was ready, and Wernher assures us that any gentleman might have enjoyed it. After washing his hands, the usual first step in a meal, a dish of fine-cut sauer-kraut was put before him, by it bacon, both fat and lean, and a rich mellow cheese. Then there was as fat a goose as ever roasted on a spit--and with what good-will they provided that extraordinary peasant luxury--a roasted and a boiled chicken. A knight out hunting, and happening on such a meal, would like it well. For besides this they had managed to get delicacies in which peasants never think of indulging. "'If I had any wine you should be drunk to-night,'" the farmer said; and he added--with such a noble union of dignity, simplicity, and sentiment for the plain homely blessings which he had appreciated and loved all his life: "'My dear son, now take a drink of water from the best spring that ever came out of earth. I know no spring fit to be compared with it, except the one at Wankhusen.'"

"'Tell me, son,'" he continued, as they went on with their dinner, for he could not wait to ask him, "'tell me how about the court fashions, and then I will tell you how they used to be when I was young.'" But the son was too busy eating to stop to talk then, and he allowed his father to relate his early reminiscences.

"'When I was a boy,' he began 'and your grandfather
Helmbrecht had sent me to court with cheese and eggs, just as
a farmer does to-day, I took note of the knights, and marked
their ways. They were courteous and cheerful and had no
rascality about them in those days, such as many men and
women too have now. The knights had a custom, to make
themselves pleasing to the ladies, that was called jousting.
A man of the court explained it to me when I asked him what
they called it. Two companies would come together from
opposite directions, riding as if they were mad, and they
would drive against each other, as if their spears must
pierce through. There's nothing in these days like what I saw
then. After that they had a dance, and while dancing they
sang lively songs, that made the time go quickly. Presently a
playman came forward and struck in with his fiddle; at that
the ladies jumped up, and the knights went to meet them, and
they took hold of hands. That was a pleasant sight--the
overflowing delight of ladies and gentlemen, dancing so
gaily, poor and rich. When that was over a man came out and
read about some one called Ernest. Each could do whatever he
liked. Some took their bows and shot at a target; others went
hunting: there was no end to the kinds of pleasure. The worst
off there would be the best off with us now. Those were the
times before false and vicious people could turn the right
about with their tricks. Nowadays the wise man is the one who
can cheat and lie; he has position and money and honor at
court, much more than the man who lives justly and strives
after God's grace.'"

We find here as in so many other places in thirteenth century poetry, that the serious-minded were already looking back. Just as we have seen Walther and Ulrich bewailing the lost sunshine of chivalry, Wernher laments that the old-time honesty has gone, and with it the knightly light-hearted honorable joys. Already, before 1250, there was a halo about the chivalric court; ladies were honored, knights tourneyed for their pleasure; dancing with them attracted gentlemen quite beyond drinking bouts; the poet's narratives of old German heroes were yet in fashion.

All this seems amusing to the young man; what sappy and goody-goody fashions those were. He thinks it manly to swagger about the new ways, and tell how the fashionable cry is "Trinka, herre, trinka trinc!" It used to be good breeding to dangle about pretty ladies, but the correct thing now is just to drink. "'This is the kind of love-letters we have: "You dear little bar-maid, fill up our cups. What a fool a man is who wastes his life for women, instead of good wine." It's a genteel thing to be sharp with your tongue, and get the best of people, and tell clever lies.'"

The old man hears, and with a sigh wishes back the day when gentlemen shouted "Hey[=a], ritter, wis et fro!" in the tourneys, instead of these new cries of riotry and pillage. The son would tell him more, but he has ridden far and wishes to go to sleep. There were no linen sheets in that farm-house, but Gotelint spread a newly washed shirt on his bed, and he slept until high day. The next morning he displayed the gifts he had brought: for his father, a whetstone, scythe, and axe; for his mother, a fox-skin; for Gotelint, a head-dress with a band of silk and gold, better fitted for a nobleman's child than for her; shoes with straps for the farm-hand; and for his wife, a cloth to cover her hair, and a red ribband. He remained at home for a week, and then he became restless to return. His father again took up his entreaties, begging him in the tenderest tones to stay from the bitter and sour life he has been leading. As long as he lives he will share what he has with him, even if the young man will do nothing but sit still and wash his hands. Only he must not go back.