MEIER HELMBRECHT,
A GERMAN FARMER OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY.
The usual conception of the middle ages seems to consist of a few facts and theories about the feudal system and the crusades, the names with possibly some traits of a few eminent public figures and a general impression of confusion and obscurity. Supplementing this central idea, one usually sees a panel picture on either side. One, sunshine flashing from the spears and armor of knights tilting in tournaments, and watched by dimly beautiful women; in the distance a solitary knight pricking over a plain, or, guided by the wail of an unseen and lovely captive, making his way through forest haunts of giants and gnomes. The other, a lowering twilight overhanging gloomy monastery walls, the shelter of melancholy, hypocrisy, manuscript illuminations, and a barren, difficult philosophy. Sunshine and twilight on either hand, and in the background an impenetrable mist concealing the great masses of humanity, as well as all concrete actual lives even of the great. A little information and a little romance are unsatisfactory artists for a sketch of mediævalism. We soon discover that there is a great deal behind such a picture of soldiers living in wars, and in the tourneying pretence of war; or schoolmen contending in brilliant logical panoply within and without spectral philosophic fastnesses; or hermits, nuns, and monks fighting against God's present that they might win His future; or marauders beating down helplessness and innocence.
Yet we may study the middle ages laboriously, and find ourselves still confronted by the mist that hangs over the rank and file. Our curiosity about these forgotten multitudes teases us. "How is it that you lived, and what is it that you did?" we ask these distant prototypes of Wordsworth's peasant. We come to discover that there is much behind our slight old notion of chivalry and monasticism; though seven hundred years have changed its conditions, life then and now is yet less different than we had thought. But we find it difficult to acquire much information about those social substrata on which the learned and the polite classes rested. Clio is the most aristocratic of the ladies nine, and that instinct of vitality whereby we count fame for ourselves something desirable, makes us think with a certain compassion of great armies of those generations filing sullenly on, not only as individuals, but as whole masses, to the grave of oblivion. The little that we know makes us sure only that they were wretched, their lives the most gloomy of all the lives of gloomy ages.
We may read thousands of pages of the literature of those days with scarcely any addition to our knowledge of the work-a-day world, for most of the poetry is romantic, and in its imitative phases mainly a reflection of courtly customs and character. The middle ages in Germany and France were anything but uncivilized, and the poetry of secondary cultivation is, as was said in the last essay, likely to prefer idealistic interpretation of its finest development to democratic realism. Yet the student finds from time to time interesting material for an account of the average life, and in the poet whom this essay is designed to introduce to a modern audience, we obtain an extended study in this side field of literary interpretation. He wrote not of high life but of the middle classes, not in romance but in a literal yet at the same time artistic manner that we may call a heightened realism. He appears to have been himself one of the people, a poet who possibly made his living by reciting poems of incident, and by singing at their merrymakings, though of this there is no evidence. It has been thought by some German scholars that he may have been a monk, but the indications make rather against than for this view. We know in fact nothing whatever about him except for one single line, in which he tells us that his name is Wernher the Gardener.