Why so? Because, it appears to me, after watching the lines of my thought converging to this point, because, with a few exceptions, the Middle Ages were rich in great beginnings (indeed a good half of all that makes up our present civilization seems to issue from them): but they were poor in complete achievements; full of the seeds of modern inst.i.tutions, arts, thoughts, and feelings, they yet show us but rarely the complete growth of any one of them: a fruitful Nile flood, but which must cease to drown and to wash away, which must subside before the germs that it has brought can shoot forth and mature. The sense of this comes home to me most powerfully whenever I think of mediaeval poetry and mediaeval painting.
The songs of the troubadours and minnesingers, what are they to our feelings? They are pleasant, even occasionally beautiful, but they are empty, lamentably empty, charming arrangements of words; poetry which fills our mind or touches our heart comes only with the Tuscan lyrists of the thirteenth century. The same applies to mediaeval narrative-verse: it is, with one or two exceptions or half exceptions, such as "The Chanson de Roland" and Gottfried"s "Tristan und Isolde," decidedly wearisome; a thing to study, but scarcely a thing to delight in. I do not mean to say that the old legends of Wales and Scandinavia, subsequently embodied by the French and German poets of the Middle Ages, are without imaginative or emotional interest; nothing can be further from my thoughts. The Nibelung story possesses, both in the Norse and in the Middle High German version, a tragic fascination; and a quaint fairy-tale interest, every now and then rising to the charm of a Decameronian _novella_, is possessed by many of the Keltic tales, whether briefly told in the Mabinogion or lengthily detailed by Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. But all this is the interest of the mere story, and you would enjoy it almost as much if that story were related not by a poet but by a peasant; it is the fascination of the mere theme, with the added fascination of our own unconscious filling up and colouring of details. And the poem itself, whence we extract this theme, remains, for the most part, uninteresting.
The figures are vague, almost shapeless and colourless; they have no well-understood mental and moral anatomy, so that when they speak and act the writer seems to have no clear conception of the motives or tempers which make them do so; even as in a child"s pictures, the horses gallop, the men run, the houses stand, but without any indication of the muscles which move the horse, of the muscles which hold up the man, of the solid ground upon which is built, nay rather, into which is planted, the house. Hatred of Hagen, devotion of Rudger, pa.s.sionate piety of Parzival--all these are things of which we do not particularly see the how or why; we do not follow the reasons, in event or character, which make these men sacrifice themselves or others, weep, storm, and so forth; nay, even when these reasons are clear from the circ.u.mstances, we are not shown the action of the mechanism, we do not see how Brunhilt is wroth, how Chriemhilt is revengeful, how Herzeloid is devoted to Parzival. There is, in the vast majority of this mediaeval poetry, no clear conception of the construction and functions of people"s character, and hence no conception either of those actions and reactions of various moral organs which, after all, are at the bottom of the events related. Herein lies the difference between the forms of the Middle Ages and those of Antiquity; for how perfectly felt, understood, is not every feeling and every action of the Homeric heroes, how perfectly indicated! We can see the manner and reason of the conflict of Achilles and Agamemnon, of the behaviour of the returned Odysseus, as clearly as we see the manner and reason of the movements of the fighting Centaurs and Lapithae, or the Amazons; nay, even the minute mood of comparatively unimportant figures, as Helen, Brisei"s, and Nausicaa, is indicated in its moral anatomy and att.i.tude as distinctly as is the manner in which the maidens of the Parthenon frieze slowly restrain their steps, the boys curb their steeds, or the old men balance their oil jars. Nothing of this in mediaeval literature, except perhaps in "Flamenca" and "Tristan," where the motive of action, mere imaginative desire, is all-permeating and explains everything. These people clearly had no interest, no perception, connected with character: a valorous woman, a chivalrous knight, an insolent steward, a jealous husband, a faithful retainer; things recognized only in outline, made to speak and act only according to a fixed tradition, without knowledge of the internal mechanism of motive; these sufficed. Hence it is that mediaeval poetry is always like mediaeval painting (for painting continued to be mediaeval with Giotto"s pupils long after poetry had ceased to be mediaeval with Dante and his school), where the Virgin sits and holds the child without body wherewith to sit or arms wherewith to hold; where angels flutter forward and kneel in conventional greeting, with obviously no bended knees beneath their robes, nay, with knees, waist, armpits, all anywhere; where men ride upon horses without flat to their back; where processions of the blessed come forth, guided by fiddling seraphs, vague, faint faces, sweet or grand, heads which might wave like pieces of cut-out paper upon their necks, arms and legs here and there, not clearly belonging to any one; creatures marching, soaring, flying, singing, fiddling, without a bone or a muscle wherewith to do it all.
And meanwhile, in this mediaeval poetry, as in this mediaeval painting, there are yards and yards of elaborate preciousness: all the embossed velvets, all the white-and-gold-shot brocades, all the silks and satins, and jewel-embroidered stuffs of the universe cast stiffly about these phantom men and women, these phantom horses and hors.e.m.e.n. It is not until we turn to Italy, and to the Northern man, Chaucer, entirely under Italian influence, that we obtain an approach to the antique clearness of perception and comprehension; that we obtain not only in Dante something akin to the muscularities of Signorelli and Michael Angelo; but in Boccaccio and Chaucer, in Cavalca and Petrarch, the equivalent of the well-understood movement, the well-indicated situation of the simple, realistic or poetic, sketches of Filippino and Botticelli.
This, you will say, is a mere impression; it is no explanation, still less such an explanation as may afford a lesson. Not so. This strange inconclusiveness in all mediaeval things, till the moment comes when they cease to be mediaeval; this richness in germs and poverty in mature fruit, cannot be without its reason. And this reason, to my mind, lies in one word, the most terrible word of any, since it means suffering and hopelessness; a word which has haunted my mind ever since I have looked into mediaeval things: the word Wastefulness. Wastefulness; the frightful characteristic of times at once so rich and so poor, the explanation of the long starvation and sickness that mankind, that all mankind"s concerns--art, poetry, science, life--endured while the very things which would have fed and revived and nurtured, existed close at hand, and in profusion. Wastefulness, in this great period of confusion, of the most precious things that we possess: time, thought, and feeling refused to the realities of the world, and lavished on the figments of the imagination. Why this vagueness, this imperfection in all mediaeval representations of life? Because even as men"s eyes were withdrawn, by the temporal inst.i.tutions of those days, from the sight of the fields and meadows which were left to the blind and dumb thing called serf; so also the thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions, were withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the mere earthly wrongs and woes of men by the great self-organized inst.i.tution of mediaeval religion.
Pity of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel; love of G.o.d; study of the unknowable things of Heaven: such are the n.o.blest employments of the mediaeval soul; how much of pity, of love, may remain for man; how much of study for the knowable? To Wastefulness like this--to misapplication of mind ending almost in palsy--must we ascribe, I think, the strange sterility of such mediaeval art as deals not merely with pattern, but with the reality of man"s body and soul. And we might be thankful, if, during our wanderings among mediaeval things, we had seen the starving of only art and artistic instincts; but the soul of man has lain starving also; starving for the knowledge which was sought only of Divine things, starving for the love which was given only to G.o.d.
The explanation, therefore, and its lesson, may thus be summed up in the one word Wastefulness. And the fruitfulness of the Renaissance, all that it has given to us of art, of thought, of feeling (for the "Vita Nuova"
is its fruit), is due, as it seems to me, to the fact that the Renaissance is simply the condition of civilization when, thanks to the civil liberty and the spiritual liberty inherited from Rome and inherited from Greece, man"s energies of thought and feeling were withdrawn from the unknowable to the knowable, from Heaven to Earth; and were devoted to the developing of those marvellous new things which Antiquity had not known, and which had lain neglected and wasted during the Middle Ages.
FLORENCE, _January_,1884.
APPENDIX.
I have seen the pictures and statues and towns which I have described, and I have read the books of which I attempt to give an impression; but here my original research, if such it may be called, comes to an end. I have trusted only to myself for my impressions; but I have taken from others everything that may be called historical fact, as distinguished from the history of this or that form of thought or of art which I have tried to elaborate. My references are therefore only to standard historical works, and to such editions of poets and prose writers as have come into my hands. How much I am endebted to the genius of Michelet; nay, rather, how much I am, however unimportant, the thing made by him, every one will see and judge. With regard to positive information I must express my great obligations to the works of Jacob Burckhardt, of Prof. Villari, and of Mr. J.A. Symonds in everything that concerns the political history and social condition of the Renaissance.
Mr. Symonds" name I have placed last, although this is by no means the order of importance in which the three writers appear in my mind, because vanity compels me to state that I have deprived myself of the pleasure and profit of reading his volumes on Italian literature, from a fear that finding myself doubtless forestalled by him in various appreciations, I might deprive my essays of what I feel to be their princ.i.p.al merit, namely, the spontaneity and wholeness of personal impression. With regard to philological lore, I may refer, among a number of other works, to M. Gaston Paris" work on the Cycle of Charlemagne, M. de la Villemarque"s companion volume on Keltic romances, and Professor Rajna"s "Fonti dell" Ariosto." My knowledge of troubadours, trouveres, and minnesingers is obtained mainly from the great collections of Raynouard, Wackernagel, Matzner, Bartsch, and Von der Hagen, and from Bartsch"s and Simrock"s editions and versions of Gottfried von Stra.s.sburg, Hartmann von Aue, and Wolfram von Eschenbach.
"Flamenca" I have read in Professor Paul Meyer"s beautiful edition, text and translation; "Auca.s.sin et Nicolette," in an edition published, if I remember rightly, by Janet; and also in a very happy translation contained in Delvau"s huge collection of "Romans de Chevalerie," which contains, unfortunately sometimes garbled, as many of the prose stories of the Carolingian and Amadis cycle as I, at all events, could endure to read. For the early Italian poets, excepting Carducci"s "Cino da Pistoia," my references are the same as those in Rossetti"s "Dante and his Cycle," especially the "Rime Antiche" and the "Poeti del Primo Secolo." Professor d"Ancona"s pleasant volume has greatly helped me in the history of the transformation of the courtly poetry of the early Middle Ages into the folk poetry of Tuscany. I owe a good deal also, with regard to this same essay "The Outdoor Poetry," to Roskoff"s famous "Geschichte des Teufels," and to Signor Novati"s recently published "Carmina Medii _aevi_." The Italian _novellieri,_ Bandello, Cinthio, and their set, I have used in the Florentine editions of 1820 or 1825; Masuccio edited by De Sanctis. For the essay on the Italian Renaissance on the Elizabethan Stage, I have had recourse, chiefly, to the fifteenth century chronicles in the "Archivio Storico Italiano," and to Dyce"s Webster, Hartley Coleridge"s Ma.s.singer and Ford, Churton Collins" Cyril Tourneur, and J.O. Halliwell"s Marston.
The essays on art have naturally profited by the now inevitable Crowe and Cavalcaselle; but in this part of my work, while I have relied very little on books, I have received more than the equivalent of the information to be obtained from any writers in the suggestions and explanations of my friend Mr. T. Nelson MacLean, who has made it possible for a mere creature of pens and ink to follow the differences of _technique_ of the sculptors and medallists of the fifteenth century; a word of thanks also, for various such suggestions as can come only from a painter, to my old friend Mr. John S. Sargent, of Paris.
I must conclude these acknowledgments by thanking the Editors of the _Contemporary, British Quarterly_, and _National Reviews_, and of the _Cornhill Magazine_, for permission to republish such of the essays or fragments of essays as have already appeared in those periodicals.
THE END.