"Of this last class am I; I have lived my life trying not to give up the three for any one. I desired and even hoped that I might obtain all the four. This hope has still deceived me, and I am made a fool by it. One day I will serve Him who has given me soul, life, thought, whatever I have; the next as a man I will strive for honor; then for wealth; on the fourth day I am for ease. Thus inconstant, I have passed my entire life."
Nothing accomplished—nothing even steadily aimed at. Nothing? With characteristic buoyancy the gray-haired poet puts aside this sombre mood of dissatisfaction with his fifty odd years. For in one point, at least, he has been true. In this book, written only because his lady commanded, he has spoken very many sweet words for worthy women, and throughout his life he has been faithful to his love. "And I do believe that the very true sweet God, through his very high goodness, will think on my fidelity to her, and my constant service."
NEIDHART VON REUENTHAL, AND HIS BAVARIAN PEASANTS.
Our liveliest pictures of old German peasantry come, as we should expect, from a singer of the knightly class. The masses had fewer and of course less accomplished poets, and these would be most likely to please their audiences by touching with the glamour of fashionable life such work as they cared to make contemporary and imitative. Realistic social transcripts usually come from culture. It may be that Neidhart von Reuenthal had been brought up at the ducal court or in a castle, but there is as good reason for conjecturing that his origin was among the scenes of country life that he describes. Most of the courtly poets belonged to the lower class of knights, and between this and the better order of peasants there was no wide dividing line; indeed, a farmer with a little land of his own and four free ancestors ("von allen vieren anen ein gebûre," as Neidhart says bitterly of his enemy the swaggering Ber), by the old Saxon law stood higher than a knight not of free blood. The agricultural class in the thirteenth century was becoming more impatient of the costly conflicts of their military superiors and was also suffering severely from the pillaging domestic raids of lawless knights, who, as they grew bolder, established centres of reckless free-booting to which they attracted wayward youth of the middle classes. Cities were also getting larger, and the tradesmen joined with the established gentry in thinking slightingly of the farming population. Accordingly there was jealousy on one side and arrogance on the other, yet there was still a meeting-place between the two classes. Depleted nobles would marry daughters of wealthy peasants, and a gentleman whose fief lay among well-to-do farmers might easily meet them in social relations.
A grant from the Bavarian Duke evidently isolated Neidhart from his own companions, and he appears to have mingled freely with the peasantry, though we cannot determine how early the contact began. He was born in the latter part of the twelfth century, we may say about 1185, perhaps, and with the exception of absence on Leopold VII's crusade of 1217-1219, he apparently kept his home in his native Bavaria until about 1230, when he lost the Duke's favor and turned as a homeless wanderer to Austria, where he received welcome and another fief. The last date inferred from his songs is 1236, in connection with the Emperor's coming, and he was dead before the composition of Meier Helmbrecht, which is earlier than 1250.