A CRITICISM of the world of feudalism, chivalry, and love may be had from the impressions and temperamental reactions of a certain thinking atom revolving in the same. The atom referred to was Walther von der Vogelweide, a German, a knight, a Minnesinger, and a national poet whose thoughts were moved by the instincts of his caste and race.
In language, temperament, and character, the Germans east of the Rhine were Germans still in the thirteenth century. They had accepted, and even vitally appropriated, Latin Christianity; those of them who were educated had received a Latin education. Yet their natures, though somewhat tempered, showed largely and distinctly German. Moreover, through the centuries, they had acquired — or rather they had never lost — a national antipathy toward those Roman papal well-springs of authority, which seemed to suck back German gold and lands in return for spiritual assurance and political betrayal.
A different and already mediaevalized element had also become part of German culture, to wit, the matter of the French Arthurian romances and the lyric fashions of Provence, which, working together, had captivated modish German circles from the Rhine to the Danube. Nevertheless the German character maintained itself in the Minnelieder which followed Provençal poetry, and in the höfisch (courtly) epics which were palpable translations from the French.1 The distinguished group of German poets, whose 29 lives fall around the year 1200, were as German as their language, although they borrowed from abroad the form and matter of their compositions.
There could be no better Germans than the two most thoughtful of the group, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Walther von der Vogelweide. Most Germanically the former wrestled with that ancient theme, “from suffering, wisdom,” which he pressed into the tale of Parzival. His great poem, achieved with toil and sweat, was mighty in its climaxes, and fit to strengthen the hearts of those men who through sorrow and loneliness and despair’s temptations were growing “slowly wise.”
The virtues which Wolfram praised and embodied in his hero, were those praised in the verses, and even, one may think, strugglingly exemplified in the conduct, of Walther von der Vogelweide,2 most famous of Minnesingers, and a power in the German lands through his Sprüche, or verses personal and political. Less is known of his life than of his whole and manly views, his poetic fancies, his musings, his hopes, and great depressions. Many places have claimed the honour of his birth, which took place somewhat before 1170. He was poor, and through his youth and manhood moved about from castle to castle, and from court to court, seeking to win some recompense for his excellent verses and good company. Thus he learned much of men, “climbing another’s stairs,” with his fellows, at the Landgraf Hermann’s Wartburg, or at the Austrian ducal Court.
Walther’s Sprüche render his moods most surely, and reflect his outlook on the world. His charming Minnelieder bear more conventional evidence. The courtly German love-songs passing by this name were affected by the conceits and conventions of the Provençal poetry upon which they 30 were modelled. A strong nature might use such with power, or break with their influence. Walther made his own the high convention of trouvère and troubadour, that love uplifts the lover’s being. Besides this, and besides the lighter forms and phrases current in such poetry, his Lieder carry natural feeling, joy, and moral levity, according to the theme; they also may express Walther’s convictions.
To take examples: Walther’s Tagelied3 imitates the Provençal alba (dawn), in which knight and truant lady bewail the coming of the light and the parting which it brings. Far more joyous, and as immoral as one pleases, is Unter der Linde, most famous of his songs. Marvellously it gives the mood of love’s joy remembered — and anticipated too. The immorality is complete (if we will be serious), and is rendered most alluring by the utter gladness of the girl’s song — no repentance, no regret; only joy and roguish laughter.
Walther was young, he was a knight and a Minnesinger; he had doubtless loved, in this way! His love-songs have plenty to say of the red mouth, good for kissing — I care not who knows it either. But he also realizes, and greatly sings, the height and breadth and worth of love the true and stable, the blessing and completion of two lives, which comes to a false heart never.4 He seems to feel it necessary to defend love for itself, perhaps because marriage was taken more seriously in this imitative German literature than in the French and Provençal originals: “Who says that love is sin, let him consider well. Many an honour dwells with her, and troth and happiness. If one does ill to the other, love is grieved. I do not mean false love; that were better named un-love. No friend of that, am I.” But his thoughts turn quickly to love as a lasting union: “He happy man, she happy woman, whose hearts are to each other true; both lives increased in price and worth; blessed their years and all their days.”5
Giving play to his caustic temper, Walther puts scorn upon the light of love: “Fool he who cannot understand what joy and good, love brings. But the light man is ever 31 pleased with light things, as is fit!”6 This Minnesinger applied most earnest standards to life; lofty his praise of the qualities of womanhood, which are better than beauty or riches: “woman” is a higher word that “lady”7 — it took a German to say this. “He who carries hidden sorrow in his heart, let him think upon a good woman — he is freed.”8 With a burst of patriotism, in one of his greatest poems Walther praises German women as the best in all the world.9
But even in the Minnelieder, Walther has his despondencies. One of the most definite, and possibly conventional, was regret for love’s labour lost, and the days of youth spent in service of an ungracious fair. The poet wonders how it is that he who has helped other men is tongue-tied before his lady. Again, his reflections broaden from thoughts of unresponsive fair ones to a conviction of life’s thanklessness. “I have well served the World (Frau Welt, Society), and gladly would serve her more, but for her evil thanks and her way of preferring fools to me. . . . Come, World, give me better greeting — the loss is not all mine.” He knows his good unbending temper which will not endure to hear ill spoken of the upright. But he thinks, what is the use? why speak so sweetly, why sing, when virtue and beauty are so lightly held, and every one does evil, fearing nought? The verse which carries these reflections is tossing in the squally haven of Society; soon the poet will encounter the wild sea without. Still from the windy harbour comes one grand lament over art’s decline: “The worst songs please, frogs’ voices! Oh, I laugh from anger! Lady World, no score of mine is on your devil’s slate. Many a life of man and woman have I made glad — might I so have gladdened mine! Here, I make my Will, and bequeath my goods — to the envious my ill-luck, my sorrows to the liars, my follies to false lovers, and to the ladies my heart’s pain.”10 He makes a solemn offering of his poems: “Good women, worthy men, a loving greeting is my due. Forty years have I sung fittingly of love; and now, take my songs which gladden, as my gift to you. Your favour be my return. And with my staff I will fare on, still wooing worth with 32 undisheartened work, as from my childhood. So shall I be, in lowly lot, one of the Noble — for me enough.”
To relish Walther’s love-songs, one need not know whether she was dark or fair, kept forest-tryst or listened by some castle’s hearth, or in what German land that castle stood. Likewise in his Sprüche, which have other bearing, the roll of his protesting voice carries the universal human. To comprehend them it were well to know that life was then as now niggardly in rewarding virtue; beyond this, one needs to have the type-idea of the Empire and the Papacy, those two powers which were set, somewhat antagonistically, on the decree of God; both claiming the world’s headship; the one, Roman in tradition, but in strength and temper German, and of this world decidedly. The other, Roman in the genius of its organization, and Christian in its subordination of the life below to the life to come, if not in the methods of establishing this consummation; Christian too, but more especially mediaeval, in its formal disdain for whatever belonged to earth. In Germany these two partial opposites were further antagonized, since the native resources recoiled from the foreign drain upon them, and the struggling patriotism of a broken land resented the pressure of a state within and above the state of duke and king and emperor.
In Walther’s time Innocent III. swayed the nations from Peter’s throne. Just before Innocent’s accession, Germany’s able emperor, Henry VI., died suddenly in Sicily (September 1197), leaving an heir not two years old. The queen-mother dying the next year, bequeathed this child, Frederick, to the paternal care of Innocent, his feudal as well as ghostly lord, since the queen, for herself and child, had accepted the Pope as the feudal suzerain of their kingdom of Sicily, In Germany (using that name loosely and broadly) Philip Hohenstauffen, Henry’s brother and Duke of Suabia, claimed the throne. His unequal opponent was Otto of Brunswick, of the ever-rebellious house of Henry the Lion. The Pope opposed the Hohenstauffen; but was obliged to acknowledge him when the course of the ten years of wasting civil war in Germany decided in his favour — whereupon, alack! Philip was murdered (1207). Quickly the Pope turned back to Otto; but the latter, after he had been crowned king and 33 Emperor, became intolerable to Innocent through the compulsion of his position as the head of an empire inherently hostile to the papacy. To thwart him Innocent set up his own ward, Frederick. Soon this precocious youth began to make head against pope-forsaken Otto; and then the excommunicated emperor was overthrown in 1214 by Philip Augustus of France, who had intervened in Frederick’s favour. So Otto passed away, and, some time after, Frederick was crowned German king at Aix-la-Chapelle.11 In the meanwhile Innocent died (1216), and amity followed between Frederick and the gentle Honorius III., who crowned Frederick emperor at Rome in 1220. This peace ended quickly when the sterner Gregory IX. ascended the papal throne on the death of Honorius in 1227.
Walther’s life extended through these events. Though apparently changing sides under the stress of his necessities, he was patriotically German to the end. First he clave to the Hohenstauffen, Philip, as the true upholder of German interests against Otto and the Pope. On Philip’s death, he turned to Otto; but with all the world left him at last for Frederick. It is known that Walther, an easily angered man, felt himself ill-used by Otto and justified in turning to the open-handed Frederick, who finally gave him a small fief. To the last, Walther upheld him as Germany’s sovereign. Probably the poet died in the year 1228, just as Gregory was succeeding Honorius, and the death-struggle of the Empire with the Papacy was opening.
With no light heart, as well may be imagined, had Walther looked about him on the death of Henry in 1197. “I sat upon a rock, crossed knee on knee, and with elbow so supported, chin on hand I leaned. Anxiously I pondered. I could see no way to win gain without loss. Honour and riches do not go hand in hand, both of less value than God’s favour. Would I have them all? Alas! riches and worldly honour and God’s favour come not within the closure of one heart’s wishes. The ways are barred; perfidy lurks in secret, and might walks the highroads. Peace and law are wounded.”12
34The personal dilemma of the poet with his fortune to make, but desirous of doing right, mirrors the desperate situation of the State: “Woe is thee, German tongue; ill stand thy order and thy honour! — I hear the lies of Rome betraying two kings!” And in verses of wrath Walther inveighs against the Pope. The sweeping nature of his denunciation raises the question whether he merely attacked the supposed treachery of the reigning pope, or was opposed to the papacy as an institution hostile to the German nation.
The answer is not clear. Mediaeval denunciations of the Church range from indictments of particular abuses, on through more general invectives, to the clear protests of heretics impugning the ecclesiastical system. It is not always easy to ascertain the speaker’s meaning. Usually the abuse and not the system is attacked. Hostility to the latter, however sweeping the language of satirist or preacher, is not lightly to be inferred. The invectives of St. Bernard and Damiani are very broad; but where had the Church more devoted sons? Even the satirists composing in Old French rarely intended an assault upon her spiritual authority. It would seem as if, at least in the Romance countries, one must look for such hostility to heretical circles, the Waldenses for example. And from the orthodox mediaeval standpoint, this was their most accursed heresy.
It would have been hard for any German to use broader language than some of the French satirists and Latin castigators. If there was a difference, it must be sought in the specific matter of the German disapproval viewed in connection with the political situation. Was a position ever taken incompatible with the Church’s absolute spiritual authority? or one intrinsically irreconcilable with the secular power of the papacy? At any time, in any country, papal claims might become irreconcilable with the royal prerogative — as William the Conqueror had held those of Gregory VII. in England, and as, two centuries afterwards, Philip the Fair was to hold those of Boniface VIII. in France. But in neither case was there such sheer and fundamental antagonism as men felt to exist between the Empire and the Papacy. Perhaps it was possible in the early thirteenth century for a German whose whole heart 35 was on the German side to dispute even the sacerdotal principle of papal authority. It is hard to judge otherwise of Freidank, the very German composer or collector of trenchant sayings in the early thirteenth century. Many of these sneer at Rome and the Pope, and some of them strike the gist of the matter: “Sunde nieman mac vergeben wan Got alein” (God alone can forgive sins”). This is the direct statement; he gives its scornful converse: “Could the Pope absolve me from my oaths and duties, I’d let other sureties go and fasten to him alone.”13 Such words mean denial of the Church’s authority to forgive, and the Pope’s to grant absolution from oaths of allegiance. Freidank is very near rejecting the principles of the ecclesiastical system.
Walther, Friedank’s contemporary, is more picturesque: “King Constantine, he gave so much — as I will tell you — to the Chair of Rome: spear, cross, and crown. At once the angels cried: ‘Alas! Alas! Alas! Christendom before stood crowned with righteousness. Now is poison fallen on her, and her honey turned to gall — sad for the world henceforth!’ To-day the princes all live in honour; only their highest languishes — so works the priest’s election. Be that denounced to thee, sweet God! The priests would upset laymen’s rights: true is the angels’ prophecy.’ ”14
On Constantine’s apocryphal gift, symbolized by the emblems of Christ’s passion, rested the secular authority of the popes, which Walther laments with the angels. “The Chair of Rome was first set up by Sorcerer Gerbert! [Queer history this, but we see what he means.] He destroyed his own soul only; but this one would bring down Christendom with him to perdition. When will all tongues call Heaven to arms, and ask God how long He will sleep? They bring to nought His work, distort His Word. His steward steals His treasure; His judge robs here and murders there; His shepherd has become a wolf among His sheep.” 15 The clergy point their fingers heavenward while they travel fast to hell.16 How laughs the Pope at us, when at home with his Italians, at the way he empties our German pockets into 36 His “poor boxes.”17 Walther’s hatred of the foreign Pope is roused at every point. And at last, in a Sprüch full of implied meaning, he declares that Christ’s word as to the tribute money meant that the emperor should receive his royal due.18
These utterances, considered in the light of the political and racial situation, seem to deny, at least implicitly, the secular power of the papacy. Yet in matters of religion Walther apparently was entirely orthodox, and a pious Christian. He has left a sweet prayer to Christ, with ample recognition of the angels and the saints, and a beautiful verse of penitent contrition, in which he confesses his sins to God very directly — how that he does the wrong, and leaves the right, and fails in love of neighbor. “Father, Son, may thy Spirit lighten mine; how may I love him who does me ill? Ever dear to me is he who treats me well!”19 Walther’s questing spirit also pondered over God’s greatness and incomprehensibility.20 His open mind is shown by the famous line: “Him (God) Christians, Jews, and heathen serve,”21 a breadth of view shared by his friend Wolfram von Eschenbach, who speaks of the chaste virtue of a heathen lady as equal to baptism.22
The personal lot of this proud heart was not an easy one; homelessness broke him down, and the bitterness of eating others’ bread. Too well had he learned of the world and all its changing ways, and how poor becomes the soul that follows them. Mortality is a trite sorrow; there are worse: “We all complain that the old die and pass away; rather let us lament taints of another hue, that troth and 37 seemliness and honour are dead.”23 At the last Walther’s grey memory of life and his vainly yearning hope took form in a great elegy. After long years he seemed, with heavy steps, and leaning on his wanderer’s staff, to be returning to a home which was changed forever: “Alas! whither are thy vanished, my many years! Did I dream my life, or is it real? what I once deemed it, was it that? And now I wake, and all the things and people once familiar, strange! My playmates, dull and old! And the fields changed; only that the streams still flow as then they flowed, my heart would break with thinking on the glad days, vanished in the sea. And the young people! slow and mirthless! and the knights go clad as peasants! Ah! Rome! thy ban! Our groans have stilled the song of birds. Fool I, to speak and so despair, — and the earth looks fair! Up knights again: your swords, your armour! would to God I might fare with your victor band, and gain my pay too — not in lands of earth! Oh! might I win the eternal crown from that sweet voyage beyond the sea, then would I sing O joy! and never more, alas — never more, alas.”24
FOOTNOTES
1 The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg and the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach have been given. One may also refer to works of older contemporaries, e.g. to the Aeneid of Heinrich von Veldeke, translated (1184) from a French rendering of Virgil; and the two courtly narrative poems, the Erec and Ivain (Knight of the Lion) taken from Chrétien of Troies by Hartmann von Aue, who flourished as the twelfth century was passing into the thirteenth.
2 On Walther von der Vogelweide, see Wilmann, Leben and Dichtung Walthers, etc. (Bonn, 1882); Schönbach, Walther von der Vogelweide (2nd ed., Berlin, 1895). The citations from his poems in this chapter follow the Pfeiffer-Bartsch edition.
3 No. 3 in the Pfeiffer-Bartsch edition.
4 184.
5 33.
6 22.
7 14, 16, 69.
8 18.
9 39.
10 See Lieder, 46, 51, 56, 59, 61, 62, 71, 72, 75, 76, 77.
11 A lucid account of this struggle is given in Luchaire, Innocent III, vol. iii. (“La Papauté et l’Empire”), Paris, 1906.
12 81.
13 From “Freidank in Auswahl,” in Hildebrand’s Didaktik aus der Zeit der Kreuzzüge, p. 336 (Deutsche Nat. Lit.).
14 85, cf. 164.
15 110.
16 113, cf. 111, 112.
17 115, 116.
18 133. My statement of the opposition to the papacy might be much more analytical, and contain further apt distinctions. But this would remove it too far from the anti-papal feeling of the common man; and the period, moreover, is not yet that of Occam and Marsilius of Padua — as to whom see Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, trans. by Maitland (Cambridge, 1900).
19 88, 137.
20 158. Walther shared the crusading spirit. The inference that he was himself a Crusader is unsafe; but he wrote stirring crusading poems, one opening with a in that in sudden power may be compared with Milton’s
“Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints.”
“Rich, hêrre, dich und dine muoter, megede kint.”
167. See also 78, 79.
21 87.
22 Parzival i. 824.
23 186.
24 188.
Elf.Ed. — See Wartburg Castle by L. Puttich. It gives an account of the “Singer-War”, a singing contest held there, which included Walther and Eschenbach, on this site.