by Will Durant
Take pity on those in need; be kind, generous, and humble. The worthy man in need is ashamed to beg; anticipate his wants…. Yet be prudent, neither lavish nor miserly…. Do not ask too many questions, nor refuse to answer a question fitly asked. Observe and listen…. Spare him who yields, whatever wrong he has done you…. Be manly and gay. Hold women in respect and love; this increases a young man’s honor. Be constant—that is manhood’s part. Short his praise who betrays honest love.48
Parzival sallies forth again, rescues the besieged Kondwiramur, marries her, challenges her returning husband to combat, kills him, and leaves his wife in search of his mother. By chance he comes to the castle of the Grail. He is entertained by its guardian knights, sees the Grail (here a precious stone), and—remembering the good Gurnemanz’ advice—asks no question about the magic Grail or the ailing king, whom he does not know to be his uncle. The next morning he finds the whole castle empty; he rides out, and the drawbridge rises behind him by unseen hands, as if forbidding his return. He rejoins Arthur’s court; but amid his welcome there the seeress Kundry accuses him of ignorance and discourtesy in not having asked the cause of Amfortas’ sickness. Parzival swears that he will find the Grail again.
But a mood of resentment darkens his life at this point. He feels that the disgrace that Kundry has laid upon him is unmerited; he perceives the abundance of injustice in the world, renounces and denounces God, and for four years visits no church, utters no prayer.49 In those years he suffers a hundred misfortunes, ever seeking, never finding, the Grail. One day he stumbles upon the retreat of an anchorite, Trevrezent, who turns out to be his uncle; learns from him the story of the Grail, and how Amfortas’ undying illness was due to leaving the guardianship of the Grail to serve an illicit love. The hermit wins Parzival back to Christian faith, and takes upon him the penalty of Parzival’s sins. Humbled and chastened, cured of his ignorance and cleansed by his sufferings, Parzival resumes his quest of the Grail. The hermit reveals to Kundry that Parzival is Amfortas’ nephew and heir; she finds him and announces that he has been chosen to succeed Amfortas as king and guardian of the Grail. Guided by her to the hidden castle, he asks Amfortas the cause of his illness, and at once the old king is healed. Parzival finds his wife Kondwiramur, who comes with him to be his queen. Lohengrin is their son.
As if to provide Wagner with another libretto, Gottfried of Strasbourg produced, about 1210, the most successful version of the Tristan story. It is an enthusiastic glorification of adultery and disloyalty, and dishonors the feudal as well as the Christian moral code.
Tristan, like Parzival, is born to a young mother, Blanchefleur, soon after she receives news that her prince husband has been killed in battle; she names the infant Tristan—sorrowful—and dies. The boy is reared and knighted by his uncle Mark, King of Cornwall. Grown up, he excels in tournaments, and kills the Irish challenger Morold; but in the combat he receives a poisoned wound, which the dying Morold tells him can be cured only by Ireland’s queen Iseult. Disguised as Tantris, a harper, Tristan visits Ireland, is cured by the queen, and becomes the tutor of the queen’s daughter, also named Iseult. Returning to Cornwall he tells Mark of the young Iseult’s beauty and accomplishments, and Mark sends him back to woo her for him. Iseult is reluctant to leave her home; and discovering that Tristan is the slayer of her uncle Morold, she is inflamed with hatred for him. But the mother persuades her to go, and gives her maid Brangäne a love potion to administer to Iseult and Mark to arouse their love. The maid gives the potion by mistake to Iseult and Tristan, who soon fall into each other’s arms. Dishonor multiplies; they agree to conceal their love; Iseult marries Mark, sleeps with Tristan, and plots to kill Brangäne as knowing too much. Mark is here (hardly in Malory) the only gentleman in the tale; he discovers the deception, tells Iseult and Tristan that they are too dear to him for revenge, and contents himself with exiling his nephew. In his wanderings Tristan meets a third Iseult, and falls in love with her, though he has sworn to be with Mark’s queen “one heart, one troth, one body, one life.” Here Gottfried leaves the tale unfinished, and all the ideals of chivalry shattered. The rest of the tale belongs to Malory and a later age.
In this astonishing generation—the first of the thirteenth century—Germany produced another poet who, with Walther, Wolfram, and Gottfried, made a quartet unequaled elsewhere in the literature of contemporary Christendom. Hartmann von Aue began by lamely following Chrétien in the poetic romances Erec and lwein; but when he turned to the legends of his native Swabia he produced a minor masterpiece—Der arme Heinrich (c. 1205). “Poor Henry,” like Job, is a rich man who at the height of his splendor is stricken with leprosy, which can only by cured (for medieval magic must have a say) when some pure maiden freely dies for him. Not expecting such a sacrifice, Henry abandons himself to lamentation and despair. But lo and behold, such a maiden appears, resolved to die that Heinrich may be healed. Her parents, thinking her decision God-inspired, give their incredible consent, and the girl bares her pretty bosom to the knife. But Heinrich suddenly becomes a man, calls a halt, refuses the sacrifice, stops his moaning, and accepts his pain as a divine visitation. Transformed in spirit by this new mood, his bodily ills rapidly disappear, and his rescuer becomes his wife. Hartmann redeemed the absurdity of the story with simple, flowing, unpretentious verse, and Germany treasured the poem until our unbelieving age.
A prettier tale was told, sometime in the first half of the thirteenth century, by an unknown Frenchman under the title C’est d’Aucassin et Nicolette. Half romance, half laughing at romance, it was fittingly phrased now in poetry now in prose, with music noted in the poetic text.
Aucassin, son of the count of Beaucaire, falls in love with Nicolette, adoptive daughter of the viscount of Beaucaire. The count objects, desiring to marry his son into some feudal family that can bring him aid in war, and he bids his vassal viscount hide the girl. When Aucassin tries to see her the viscount counsels him to “leave Nicolette alone, or you will never see paradise.” To which Aucassin answers in a literary correlate to the rising skepticism of the time.
In paradise what have I to do? I care not to enter it, but only to have Nicolette…. For into paradise go none but such people as aged priests, old cripples, and the maimed, who all day and night cough before the altars…. With them have I nought to do. But to hell will I go. For to hell go the fine scholars, and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney or the great wars, and the stout archer, and the loyal man. With them will I go. And there go the fair and courteous ladies, who have friends—two or three—besides their wedded lord. And there pass the … harpers and minstrels, and the kings of this world. With these will I go so only that I have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, by my side.50
Nicolette’s father confines her to her room, and Aucassin’s father imprisons him in a cellar, where the lad sings of a strange and charming cure:
Nicolette, white lily-flower,
Sweetest lady found in bower,
Sweet as grape that brimmeth up
Sweetness in the spicèd cup,
On a day this chanced to you,
Out of Limousin there drew
One, a pilgrim, sore and dread,
Lay in pain upon his bed,
Tossed, and took with fear his breath,
Very dolent, near to death.
Then you entered, pure and white,
Softly to the sick man’s sight
Raised the train that swept adown,
Raised the ermine-bordered gown,
Raised the smock, and bared to him
Daintily each lovely limb.
Then a wondrous thing befell,
Straight he rose up sound and well,
Left his bed, took cross in hand,
Sought again his own dear land.
Lily-flower, so white, so sweet,
Fair the faring of thy feet,
Fair thy laughter, fair thy speech,
Fair our playing each with each.
Sweet thy kisse
s, soft thy touch,
All must love thee overmuch.51
Meanwhile the lily-flower makes a rope of her bed sheets, and lets herself down into the garden.
Then she took her skirt in both hands … and kilted her lightly against the dew which lay thickly on the grass, and so she passed through the garden. Her hair was golden, with little love-locks; her eyes blue and laughing; her face most dainty to see, with lips more vermeil than ever rose or cherry in summer heat; her teeth white and small; her breasts so firm that they showed beneath her vesture like two rounded nuts. So frail was she about the girdle that your two hands could have spanned her; and the daisies that she brake with her feet in passing showed altogether black against her instep and her flesh, so white was the fair young maid.52
She finds her way to a barred window of Aucassin’s cell, cuts a tress of her hair, slips it to him, and swears that her love is as great as his. Her father sends searchers for her; she flees into the woods, and lives with appreciative shepherds. After some time Aucassin’s father, thinking her safely out of sight, frees him. Aucassin takes to the woods and hunts for her through half-comic vicissitudes. He finds her, sets her before him on his horse, “kissing her as they rode.” To escape their pursuing parents they take ship across the Mediterranean; they come to a land where men give birth and wars are fought by jolly pummeling with fruit. They are captured by less amiable warriors, are separated for three years, but at last are made one again. The irate parents kindly die, and Aucassin and Nicolette become the Count and Countess of Beaucaire. There is nothing more exquisite in all the rich literature of France.
VIII. THE SATIRICAL REACTION
The humorous interludes of this story suggest that the French were beginning to feel a surfeit of romance. The most famous poem of the Middle Ages—far more widely known and read than The Divine Comedy—began as a romance and ended as one of the heartiest, bluntest satires in history. About 1237 Guillaume de Lorris, a young scholar of Orléans, composed an allegorical poem which was designed to enclose the whole art of courtly love, and to be, through its very abstractions, a model and summary of all amorous romance. We know nothing of William of the Loire except that he wrote the first 4266 lines of the Roman de la rose. He pictures himself wandering in a dream into a gorgeous Garden of Love, where every known flower blooms and all birds sing, and happy couples, personifying the joys and graces of the gallant life—Mirth, Gladness, Courtesy, Beauty… —dance under the presidency of the God of Love; here is a new religion, with a new conception of paradise, in which woman replaces God. Within this garden-the dreamer sees a rose lovelier than all the beauty that surrounds it, but guarded by a thousand thorns. It is the symbol of the Beloved; and the hero’s longing to reach and pluck it becomes an allegory of all the amorous campaigns ever waged by checked desire feeding imagination. No human being but the narrator enters the tale; all the other actors are personifications of the qualities of character to be found at any court where women are pursued by men: Fair-Seeming, Pride, Villainy, Shame, Wealth, Avarice, Envy, Sloth, Hypocrisy, Youth, Despair, even “New Thought”—which here means inconstancy. The marvel of it is that with these abstractions Guillaume managed to make interesting verse—perhaps because at any age and in any guise love is as interesting as the blood is warm.*
William died prematurely, leaving his poem unfinished; and for forty years the world had to wonder if the Lover, shot by Cupid and shivering with love, had ever done more than kiss the Rose. Then another Frenchman, Jean de Meung, took up the torch, and carried it to over 22,000 lines, in a poem as different from William’s as Rabelais from Tennyson. The lapse of a generation had changed the mood; romance had talked itself out for a while; philosophy was casting the pall of reason over the poetry of faith; the Crusades had failed; the age of doubt and satire had begun. Some say that Jean wrote his boisterous continuation at the suggestion of the same King Philip IV who would send his skeptical lawyers to laugh in the face of the Pope. Jean Clopinel was born at Meung on the Loire about 1250, studied philosophy and literature at Paris, and became one of the most learned men of his time. We know not what imp of the perverse led him to put his learning, his anticlericalism, his contempt of woman and romance, into a continuation of the most romantic poem in all literature. In the same eight-syllabled lines and rhyming couplets as William’s, but with a verve and vivacity all the world away from William’s dreamy verse, Jean airs his views on all topics from the Creation to the Last Judgment, while his poor lover waits in the garden, all this time longing for the Rose. If Jean has any romance left in him it is Plato’s fancy of a Golden Age in the past, when “no man called this or that his own, and lust and rapine were unknown”; when there were no feudal lords, no state, no laws; when men lived without eating flesh or fish or fowl, and “all shared earth’s gift in common lot.”53 He is not a freethinker; he accepts the dogmas of the Church without winking an eye; but he dislikes “those stout and thriving blades, the begging friars, who cheat with lying words while drink and meat they batten on.”54 He cannot stomach hypocrites, and recommends garlic and onions to them to facilitate their crocodile tears.55 He admits that a “gracious woman’s love” is life’s best boon, but apparently he has not known it.56 Perhaps he did not deserve it; satire never won fair maiden; and Jean, too schooled in Ovid, thought and taught more of using women than of loving them. Monogamy is absurd, he says; nature intended toutes pour touz—all women for all men. He makes a sated husband chide a primping wife:
What comes of all this bravery?
What benefit accrues to me
From costly gowns and quaint-cut gear,
Your flirting tricks and mincing cheer?
What for these orphreys do I care
With which you twist and bind your hair,
Entwined with threads of gold? And why
Must you have set in ivory
Enameled mirrors, sprinkled o’er
With golden circlets? … Why these gems
Befitting kingly diadems?—
Rubies and pearls, and sapphires fair,
Which cause you to assume an air
Of mad conceit? These costly stuffs,
And plaited furbelows and ruffs,
And cinctures to set off your waist,
With pearls bedecked and richly chased?
And wherefore, say, then, do you choose
To fit your feet with gaudy shoes
Except you have a lust to show
Your shapely legs? By St. Thibaud,
Ere yet three days are past I’ll sell
This trash, and trample you pell-mell!57
It is some consolation to learn that in the end the God of Love, at the head of his innumerable vassals, storms the tower where Danger, Shame, and Fear (the lady’s hesitations) guard the Rose, and Welcome admits the Lover to the inner shrine, and lets him pluck the image of his dreams. But how can this long-deferred romantic termination wipe out 18,000 lines of peasant realism and goliardic ribaldry?
The three most widely read books in the Western Europe of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were the Romance of the Rose, the Golden Legend, and Reynard the Fox. Reynard began his Latin career as Ysengrinus about 1150, and passed into various vernaculars as Roman de Renart, Reynard the Fox, Reineke de Vos, Reinaert, finally as Goethe’s Reinecke Fuchs. Divers authors contributed some thirty merry tales to the cycle until it totaled 24,000 lines, nearly all devoted to satirizing feudal forms, royal courts, Christian ceremonies, and human frailties through animal analogies.
Renart the fox plays impish tricks on Noble the lion, king of the realm. He scents Noble’s amour with Dame Harouge the leopardess, and by intrigues worthy of Talleyrand he persuades her to play mistress to himself. He propitiates Noble and other beasts by giving each a talisman that tells a husband of his wife’s infidelities. Dreadful revelations ensue; the husbands beat their guilty wives, who flee for refuge to Renart, who gathers them into a harem. In one tale the animals engage in a tournament, in solemn knightly reg
alia and parade. In La Mort Renart the old fox is dying; Bernard the ass, archbishop of the court, comes to administer the sacraments to him with extreme unction and gravity. Renart confesses his sins, but stipulates that if he recovers his oath of reform is to be held null and void. To all appearances he dies, and the many beasts whom he has cuckolded, beaten, plucked, or cozened gather to mourn him with happy hypocrisy. The archbishop preaches a Rabelaisian sermon over the grave, and reproaches Renart for having considered “anything in season if you could get hold of it.” But when holy water is sprinkled upon him Renart revives, catches Chantecler (who is swinging the censer) by the neck, and bolts into a thicket with his prey. To understand the Middle Ages one must never forget Renart.
The Roman de Renart was the greatest of the fabliaux. A fabliau was a fable of animals satirizing man, usually in octosyllabic verse running from thirty to a thousand lines. Some were as old as Aesop or older; some came from India through Islam. Mostly they lampooned women and priests, resenting the natural powers of the one class and the supernatural powers of the other; besides, ladies and priests had condemned the minstrels for reciting scandalous fabliaux. For the fabliaux were directed to strong stomachs; they appropriated the terminology of taverns and brothels, and gave meter to unmeasured pleasantries. But from their stews Chaucer, Boccaccio, Ariosto, La Fontaine, and a hundred other raconteurs brewed many a startling tale.