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WINE, WOMEN, AND SONG


"Wer liebt nicht Weib Wein and Gesang
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Lebenslang."

--_Martin Luther._


_MEDIAEVAL LATIN STUDENTS' SONGS_

Now First Translated into English Verse

WITH AN ESSAY



BY

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS




London

CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1884




TO

_ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON._


_Dear Louis,_

_To you, in memory of past symposia, when wit (your wit) flowed freer
than our old Forzato, I dedicate this little book, my pastime through
three anxious months._

_Yours,_

_JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS_

_Villa Emily, San Remo,_

_May 1884._




Wine, Women, and Song.

I.


When we try to picture to ourselves the intellectual and moral state
of Europe in the Middle Ages, some fixed and almost stereotyped ideas
immediately suggest themselves. We think of the nations immersed in a
gross mental lethargy; passively witnessing the gradual extinction of
arts and sciences which Greece and Rome had splendidly inaugurated;
allowing libraries and monuments of antique civilisation to crumble
into dust; while they trembled under a dull and brooding terror of
coming judgment, shrank from natural enjoyment as from deadly sin, or
yielded themselves with brutal eagerness to the satisfaction of vulgar
appetites. Preoccupation with the other world in this long period
weakens man's hold upon the things that make his life desirable.
Philosophy is sunk in the slough of ignorant, perversely subtle
disputation upon subjects destitute of actuality. Theological
fanaticism has extinguished liberal studies and the gropings of the
reason after truth in positive experience. Society lies prostrate
under the heel of tyrannous orthodoxy. We discern men in masses,
aggregations, classes, guilds--everywhere the genus and the species of
humanity, rarely and by luminous exception individuals and persons.
Universal ideals of Church and Empire clog and confuse the nascent
nationalities. Prolonged habits, of extra-mundane contemplation,
combined with the decay of real knowledge, volatilise the thoughts and
aspirations of the best and wisest into dreamy unrealities, giving a
false air of mysticism to love, shrouding art in allegory, reducing
the interpretation of texts to an exercise of idle ingenuity, and the
study of Nature (in Bestiaries, Lapidaries, and the like) to an insane
system of grotesque and pious quibbling. The conception of man's fall
and of the incurable badness of this world bears poisonous fruit of
cynicism and asceticism, that twofold bitter almond, hidden in the
harsh monastic shell. The devil has become God upon this earth, and
God's eternal jailer in the next world. Nature is regarded with
suspicion and aversion; the flesh, with shame and loathing, broken by
spasmodic outbursts of lawless self-indulgence. For human life there
is one formula:--

"Of what is't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror."

The contempt of the world is the chief theme of edification. A charnel
filled with festering corpses, snakes, and worms points the preacher's
moral. Before the eyes of all, in terror-stricken vision or in
nightmares of uneasy conscience, leap the inextinguishable flames of
hell. Salvation, meanwhile, is being sought through amulets, relics,
pilgrimages to holy places, fetishes of divers sorts and different
degrees of potency. The faculties of the heart and head, defrauded of
wholesome sustenance, have recourse to delirious debauches of the
fancy, dreams of magic, compacts with the evil one, insanities of
desire, ineptitudes of discipline. Sexual passion, ignoring the true
place of woman in society, treats her on the one hand like a servile
instrument, on the other exalts her to sainthood or execrates her as
the chief impediment to holiness. Common sense, sanity of judgment,
acceptance of things as they are, resolution to ameliorate the evils
and to utilise the goods of life, seem everywhere deficient. Men are
obstinate in misconception of their proper aims, wasting their
energies upon shadows instead of holding fast by realities, waiting
for a future whereof they know nothing, in lieu of mastering and
economising the present. The largest and most serious undertakings of
united Europe in this period--the Crusades--are based upon a radical
mistake. "Why seek ye the living among the dead? Behold, He is not
here, but risen!" With these words ringing in their ears, the nations
flock to Palestine and pour their blood forth for an empty sepulchre.
The one Emperor who attains the object of Christendom by rational
means is excommunicated for his success. Frederick II. returns from
the Holy Land a ruined man because he made a compact useful to his
Christian subjects with the Chief of Islam.




II.


Such are some of the stereotyped ideas which crowd our mind when we
reflect upon the Middle Ages. They are certainly one-sided. Drawn for
the most part from the study of monastic literature, exaggerated by
that reaction against medievalism which the Renaissance initiated,
they must be regarded as inadequate to represent the whole truth. At
no one period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the close of
the thirteenth century was the mental atmosphere of Europe so
unnaturally clouded. Yet there is sufficient substance in them to
justify their formulation. The earlier Middle Ages did, in fact,
extinguish antique civility. The later Middle Ages did create, to use
a phrase of Michelet, an army of dunces for the maintenance of
orthodoxy. The intellect and the conscience became used to moving
paralytically among visions, dreams, and mystic terrors, weighed down
with torpor, abusing virile faculties for the suppression of truth and
the perpetuation of revered error.

It is, therefore, with a sense of surprise, with something like a
shock to preconceived opinions, that we first become acquainted with
the medieval literature which it is my object in the present treatise
to make better known to English readers. That so bold, so fresh, so
natural, so pagan a view of human life as the Latin songs of the
Wandering Students exhibit, should have found clear and artistic
utterance in the epoch of the Crusades, is indeed enough to bid us
pause and reconsider the justice of our stereotyped ideas about that
period. This literature makes it manifest that the ineradicable
appetites and natural instincts of men and women were no less vigorous
in fact, though less articulate and self-assertive, than they had been
in the age of Greece and Rome, and than they afterwards displayed
themselves in what is known as the Renaissance.

With something of the same kind we have long been familiar in the
Troubadour poetry of Provence. But Provencal literature has a strong
chivalrous tincture, and every one is aware with what relentless fury
the civilisation which produced it was stamped out by the Church. The
literature of the Wandering Students, on the other hand, owes nothing
to chivalry, and emanates from a class which formed a subordinate part
of the ecclesiastical militia. It is almost vulgar in its presentment
of common human impulses; it bears the mark of the proletariate,
though adorned with flourishes betokening the neighbourhood of Church
and University.




III.


Much has recently been written upon the subject of an abortive
Renaissance within the Middle Ages. The centre of it was France, and its
period of brilliancy may be roughly defined as the middle and end of
the twelfth century. Much, again, has been said about the religious
movement in England, which spread to Eastern Europe, and anticipated the
Reformation by two centuries before the date of Luther. The songs of the
Wandering Students, composed for the most part in the twelfth century,
illustrate both of these early efforts after self-emancipation. Uttering
the unrestrained emotions of men attached by a slender tie to the
dominant clerical class and diffused over all countries, they bring us
face to face with a body of opinion which finds in studied chronicle or
laboured dissertation of the period no echo. On the one side, they
express that delight in life and physical enjoyment which was a main
characteristic of the Renaissance; on the other, they proclaim that
revolt against the corruption of Papal Rome which was the motive-force
of the Reformation.

Our knowledge of this poetry is derived from two chief sources. One is
a MS. of the thirteenth century, which was long preserved in the
monastery of Benedictbeuern in Upper Bavaria, and is now at Munich.
Richly illuminated with rare and curious illustrations of contemporary
manners, it seems to have been compiled for the use of some
ecclesiastical prince. This fine codex was edited in 1847 at
Stuttgart. The title of the publication is _Carmina Burana_, and under
that designation I shall refer to it. The other is a Harleian MS.,
written before 1264, which Mr. Thomas Wright collated with other
English MSS., and published in 1841 under the name of _Latin Poems
commonly attributed to Walter Mapes_.

These two sources have to some extent a common stock of poems, which
proves the wide diffusion of the songs in question before the date
assignable to the earlier of the two MS. authorities. But while this
is so, it must be observed that the _Carmina Burana_ are richer in
compositions which form a prelude to the Renaissance; the English
collections, on the other hand, contain a larger number of serious and
satirical pieces anticipating the Reformation.

Another important set of documents for the study of the subject are
the three large works of Edelstand du Meril upon popular Latin poetry;
while the stores at our disposal have been otherwise augmented by
occasional publications of German and English scholars, bringing to
light numerous scattered specimens of a like description. Of late it
has been the fashion in Germany to multiply anthologies of medieval
student-songs, intended for companion volumes to the _Commersbuch_.
Among these, one entitled _Gaudeamus_ (Teubner, 2d edition, 1879)
deserves honourable mention.

It is my purpose to give a short account of what is known about the
authors of these verses, to analyse the general characteristics of
their art, and to illustrate the theme by copious translations. So far
as I am aware, the songs of Wandering Students offer almost absolutely
untrodden ground to the English translator; and this fact may be
pleaded in excuse for the large number which I have laid under
contribution.

In carrying out my plan, I shall confine myself principally, but not
strictly, to the _Carmina Burana_. I wish to keep in view the
anticipation of the Renaissance rather than to dwell upon those
elements which indicate an early desire for ecclesiastical reform.




IV.


We have reason to conjecture that the Romans, even during the
classical period of their literature, used accentual rhythms for
popular poetry, while quantitative metres formed upon Greek models
were the artificial modes employed by cultivated writers. However this
may be, there is no doubt that, together with the decline of antique
civilisation, accent and rhythm began to displace quantity and metre
in Latin versification. Quantitative measures, like the Sapphic and
Hexameter, were composed accentually. The services and music of the
Church introduced new systems of prosody. Rhymes, both single and
double, were added to the verse; and the extraordinary flexibility of
medieval Latin--that sonorous instrument of varied rhetoric used by
Augustine in the prose of the _Confessions_, and gifted with poetic
inspiration in such hymns as the _Dies Irae_ or the _Stabat
Mater_--rendered this new vehicle of literary utterance adequate to
all the tasks imposed on it by piety and metaphysic. The language of
the _Confessions_ and the _Dies Irae_ is not, in fact, a decadent form
of Cicero's prose or Virgil's verse, but a development of the Roman
speech in accordance with the new conditions introduced by
Christianity. It remained comparatively sterile in the department of
prose composition, but it attained to high qualities of art in the
verse and rhythms of men like Thomas of Celano, Thomas of Aquino, Adam
of St. Victor, Bernard of Morlais, and Bernard of Clairvaux. At the
same time, classical Latin literature continued to be languidly
studied in the cloisters and the schools of grammar. The metres of the
ancients were practised with uncouth and patient assiduity, strenuous
efforts being made to keep alive an art which was no longer rightly
understood. Rhyme invaded the hexameter, and the best verses of the
medieval period in that measure were leonine.

The hymns of the Church and the secular songs composed for music in
this base Latin took a great variety of rhythmic forms. It is clear
that vocal melody controlled their movement; and one fixed element in
all these compositions was rhyme--rhyme often intricate and complex
beyond hope of imitation in our language. Elision came to be
disregarded; and even the accentual values, which may at first have
formed a substitute for quantity, yielded to musical notation. The
epithet of popular belongs to these songs in a very real sense, since
they were intended for the people's use, and sprang from popular
emotion. Poems of this class were technically known as _moduli_--a
name which points significantly to the importance of music in their
structure. Imitations of Ovid's elegiacs or of Virgil's hexameters
obtained the name of _versus_. Thus Walter of Lille, the author of a
regular epic poem on Alexander, one of the best medieval writers of
_versus_, celebrates his skill in the other department of popular
poetry thus--

"Perstrepuit _modulis_ Gallia tota meis."
(All France rang with my songs.)

We might compare the _versus_ of the Middle Ages with the stiff
sculptures on a Romanesque font, lifelessly reminiscent of decadent
classical art; while the _moduli_, in their freshness, elasticity, and
vigour of invention, resemble the floral scrolls, foliated cusps, and
grotesque basreliefs of Gothic or Lombard architecture.




V.


Even in the half-light of what used to be called emphatically the Dark
Ages, there pierce gleams which may be reflections from the past
evening of paganism, or may intimate the earliest dawn of modern
times. One of these is a song, partly popular, partly scholastic,
addressed to a beautiful boy.[1] It begins thus--

"O admirabile veneris idolum"--

and continues in this strain, upon the same rhythm, blending
reminiscences of classical mythology and medieval metaphysic, and
winding up with a reference to the Horatian _Vitas hinnuleo me similis
Chloe_. This poem was composed in the seventh century, probably at
Verona, for mention is made in it of the river Adige. The metre can
perhaps be regarded as a barbarous treatment of the long Asclepiad;
but each line seems to work out into two bars, divided by a marked
rest, with two accents to each bar, and shows by what sort of
transition the modern French Alexandrine may have been developed.

The oddly archaic phraseology of this love-song rendered it unfit for
translation; but I have tried my hand at a kind of hymn in praise of
Rome, which is written in the same peculiar rhythm:[2]--

"O Rome illustrious, of the world emperess!
Over all cities thou queen in thy goodliness!
Red with the roseate blood of the martyrs, and
White with the lilies of virgins at God's right hand!
Welcome we sing to thee; ever we bring to thee
Blessings, and pay to thee praise for eternity.

"Peter, thou praepotent warder of Paradise,
Hear thou with mildness the prayer of thy votaries;
When thou art seated to judge the twelve tribes, O then
Show thyself merciful; be thou benign to men;
And when we call to thee now in the world's distress,
Take thou our suffrages, master, with gentleness.

"Paul, to our litanies lend an indulgent ear,
Who the philosophers vanquished with zeal severe:
Thou that art steward now in the Lord's heavenly house,
Give us to taste of the meat of grace bounteous;
So that the wisdom which filled thee and nourished thee
May be our sustenance through the truths taught by thee."

A curious secular piece of the tenth century deserves more than
passing mention. It shows how wine, women, and song, even in an age
which is supposed to have trembled for the coming destruction of the
world, still formed the attraction of some natures. What is more,
there is a certain modern, as distinguished from classical, tone of
tenderness in the sentiment. It is the invitation of a young man to
his mistress, bidding her to a little supper in his rooms:[3]--

"Come therefore now, my gentle fere,
Whom as my heart I hold full dear;
Enter my little room, which is
Adorned with quaintest rarities:
There are the seats with cushions spread,
The roof with curtains overhead;
The house with flowers of sweetest scent
And scattered herbs is redolent:
A table there is deftly dight
With meats and drinks of rare delight;
There too the wine flows, sparkling, free;
And all, my love, to pleasure thee.
There sound enchanting symphonies;
The clear high notes of flutes arise;
A singing girl and artful boy
Are chanting for thee strains of joy;
He touches with his quill the wire,
She tunes her note unto the lyre:
The servants carry to and fro
Dishes and cups of ruddy glow;
But these delights, I will confess,
Than pleasant converse charm me less;
Nor is the feast so sweet to me
As dear familiarity.

"Then come now, sister of my heart,
That dearer than all others art,
Unto mine eyes thou shining sun,
Soul of my soul, thou only one!
I dwelt alone in the wild woods,
And loved all secret solitudes;
Oft would I fly from tumults far,
And shunned where crowds of people are.
O dearest, do not longer stay!
Seek we to live and love to-day!
I cannot live without thee, sweet!
Time bids us now our love complete.
Why should we then defer, my own,
What must be done or late or soon?
Do quickly what thou canst not shun!
I have no hesitation."

From Du Meril's collections further specimens of thoroughly secular
poetry might be culled. Such is the panegyric of the nightingale,
which contains the following impassioned lines:[4]--

"Implet silvas atque cuncta modulis arbustula,
Gloriosa valde facta veris prae laetitia;
Volitando scandit alta arborum cacumina,
Ac festiva satis gliscit sibilare carmina."

Such are the sapphics on the spring, which, though they date from the
seventh century, have a truly modern sentiment of Nature. Such, too,
is the medieval legend of the Snow-Child, treated comically in
burlesque Latin verse, and meant to be sung to a German tune of
love--

_Modus Liebinc_. To the same category may be referred the horrible, but
singularly striking, series of Latin poems edited from a MS. at Berne,
which set forth the miseries of monastic life with realistic passion
bordering upon delirium, under titles like the following--_Dissuasio
Concubitus in in Uno tantum Sexu_, or _De Monachi Cruciata_.[5]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Du Meril, _Poesies Populaires Latines Anterieures au
Deuxieme: Siecle_, p. 240.]

[Footnote 2: Du Meril, _op. cit._, p. 239.]

[Footnote 3: Du Meril, _Poesies Populaires Latines du Moyen Age_, p.
196.]

[Footnote 4: Du Meril, _Poesies Pop. Lat. Ant._, pp. 278, 241, 275.]

[Footnote 5: These extraordinary compositions will be found on pp.
174-182 of a closely-printed book entitled _Carmina Med. Aev. Max.
Part. Inedita. Ed. H. Hagenus. Bernae. Ap. G. Frobenium_. MDCCCLXXVII.
The editor, so far as I can discover, gives but scant indication of
the poet who lurks, with so much style and so terrible emotions, under
the veil of Cod. Bern., 702 s. Any student who desires to cut into the
core of cloister life should read cvii. pp. 178-182, of this little
book.]




VI.


There is little need to dwell upon these crepuscular stirrings of
popular Latin poetry in the earlier Middle Ages. To indicate their
existence was necessary; for they serve to link by a dim and fragile
thread of evolution the decadent art of the base Empire with the
renascence of paganism attempted in the twelfth century, and thus to
connect that dawn of modern feeling with the orient splendours of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy.

The first point to notice is the dominance of music in this verse, and
the subjugation of the classic metres to its influence. A deeply
significant transition has been effected from the _versus_ to the
_modulus_ by the substitution of accent for quantity, and by the value
given to purely melodic cadences. A long syllable and a short
syllable have almost equal weight in this prosody, for the musical
tone can be prolonged or shortened upon either. So now the
_cantilena_, rather than the _metron_, rules the flow of verse; but,
at the same time, antique forms are still conventionally used, though
violated in the using. In other words, the modern metres of the modern
European races--the Italian Hendecasyllable, the French Alexandrine,
the English Iambic and Trochaic rhythms--have been indicated; and a
moment has been prepared when these measures shall tune themselves by
means of emphasis and accent to song, before they take their place as
literary schemes appealing to the ear in rhetoric. This phase, whereby
the metres of antiquity pass into the rhythms of the modern races,
implies the use of medieval Latin, still not unmindful of classic art,
but governed now by music often of Teutonic origin, and further
modified by affinities of prosody imported from Teutonic sources.

The next point to note is that, in this process of transition, popular
ecclesiastical poetry takes precedence of secular. The great rhyming
structures of the Middle Ages, which exercised so wide an influence
over early European literature, were invented for the service of the
Church--voluminous systems of recurrent double rhymes, intricate
rhythms moulded upon tunes for chanting, solid melodic fabrics, which,
having once been formed, were used for lighter efforts of the fancy,
or lent their ponderous effects to parody. Thus, in the first half of
the centuries which intervene between the extinction of the genuine
Roman Empire and the year 1300, ecclesiastical poetry took the lead in
creating and popularising new established types of verse, and in
rendering the spoken Latin pliable for various purposes of art.

A third point worthy of attention is, that a certain breath of
paganism, wafting perfumes from the old mythology, whispering of gods
in exile, encouraging men to accept their life on earth with genial
enjoyment, was never wholly absent during the darkest periods of the
Middle Ages. This inspiration uttered itself in Latin; for we have
little reason to believe that the modern languages had yet attained
plasticity enough for the expression of that specific note which
belongs to the Renaissance--the note of humanity conscious of its
Graeco-Roman pagan past. This Latin, meanwhile, which it employed was
fabricated by the Church and used by men of learning.




VII.


The songs of the Wandering Students were in a strict sense _moduli_ as
distinguished from _versus_; popular and not scholastic. They were,
however, composed by men of culture, imbued with classical learning of
some sort, and prepared by scholarship for the deftest and most
delicate manipulation of the Latin language.

Who were these Wandering Students, so often mentioned, and of whom
nothing has been as yet related? As their name implies, they were men,
and for the most part young men, travelling from university to
university in search of knowledge. Far from their homes, without
responsibilities, light of purse and light of heart, careless and
pleasure-seeking, they ran a free, disreputable course, frequenting
taverns at least as much as lecture-rooms, more capable of pronouncing
judgment upon wine or women than upon a problem of divinity or logic.
The conditions of medieval learning made it necessary to study
different sciences in different parts of Europe; and a fixed habit of
unrest, which seems to have pervaded society after the period of the
Crusades, encouraged vagabondage in all classes. The extent to which
travelling was carried in the Middle Ages for purposes of pilgrimage
and commerce, out of pure curiosity or love of knowledge, for the
bettering of trade in handicrafts or for self-improvement in the
sciences, has only of late years been estimated at a just calculation.
"The scholars," wrote a monk of Froidmont in the twelfth century, "are
wont to roam around the world and visit all its cities, till much
learning makes them mad; for in Paris they seek liberal arts, in
Orleans authors, at Salerno gallipots, at Toledo demons, and in no
place decent manners."

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