"'My son, my own dear boy, give up going. You shall live on what I live, and on what your mother gives you. Drink water, my dear son, before you steal to buy wine. Austrian pie, any one, fool or wise man, will tell you, is food fit for gentlemen. Eat that, dear child, instead of giving an ox you have stolen to some inn-keeper for a chicken. Your mother can cook good broth; eat that, instead of giving a stolen horse for a goose. My son, mix rye with oats sooner than eat fish in a dishonored life. If you will not obey me, go. But though you win wealth and great honors, never will I share them with you. And misfortune—have that alone too.'
"'You drink water, father, but I'll drink wine. Eat your mush, but I'll eat what they call fricasseed chicken there and white wheat bread; oats will do for you. They say at Rome that a child takes after his godfather, and mine was a knight. Thank God for giving me such high and noble ideas.'"
But the old farmer replied that he liked much better a man who did right and remained constant to it.
"Even though his birth might be rather humble, he would please the world better than a king's son without virtue and honor. An honest man of lowly rank, and a nobleman who was not courteous and honorable,—let the two come to a land where neither is known, and the child of lowly birth will outrank the high-born. My son, if you will be noble, on my word I counsel you, do noble deeds. Good life is a crown above all nobility."
There is the old thought, so common in literature from ancient authors down to the poet of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, and especially a favorite with writers of the middle age. Possibly some of them caught it from Boëthius, who expressed it more than once in the testament of wise and generous character that he left to the world from his confinement at Pavia, and that proved so singularly congenial to the mediæval mind; but we need certainly not require the aid of origins to account for its frequency. Aristocratic as many phases of the times were, there were a number of important evening influences, conspicuously two: the church, in whose monastery cloisters the rich and poor met together as brothers of one impartial discipline, and from whose ranks members of low birth might rise to be the peers of dukes; and the orders of chivalry, which received approved squires from the middle class. Thus, in addition to aristocracy of birth, there was a conditional gentility to which those who had the claim of merit might aspire. But though the thought that desert, and not descent, is the test for nobility, is so obvious in the days when position carried with it so strong a connotation of power, and when the upper strata of society bore down so hard and haughtily upon the lower, we always feel satisfaction in coming upon a trim statement of the fine old commonplace whose best mediæval expression we can quote from a poet of our own language:
"Look, who that is moost vertuous alway,
Pryvee and apert, and moost entendeth ay
To do the gentil dedes that he kan,
Taak hym for the grettest gentil man."
"'Alas, that your mother bore you!'" the farmer exclaimed, when the boy's only answer to his appeal was to declare his hair and hood better fitted for a dance than for the plough or the harrow. "'Thou wilt leave the best and do the worst'"; and he goes on to contrast the man who lives against God and the good of others, followed by every one's curses, with the man who helps the world along, trying night and day to do good by his life, and thereby honors God. This one, wherever he may turn, has the love of God and all the world.
"'Dear son,' he says, 'that man you might be, if you would yield to me. Till with the plough, and plenty of people will be the better for your life, poor and rich; nay, even wolf and eagle, and everything that lives on earth. Many a woman must be made more beautiful through the farmer, many a king must be crowned through the produce of the farm. Indeed, there is no one so noble that his pride would not be a very small thing, except for the farmer.'"
How natural all this sounds,—agriculture the basis of society, tillage of the soil alike useful and honorable. With what quiet manliness this old German talks of the dignity of labor, with no touch of the modern arrogance and discontent with the existing social condition. He will keep to his rank in life, and be loyal to his station, yet, though he looks up with a simple-hearted interest and wonder to the great world above him, he reflects as he follows his plough that without him that great world's pride "would be a very small thing." But there is a quality here that is still finer: the undercurrent perception of "the gospel of service." It is not only that honesty is the best policy, though the peasant is shrewd, and appreciates the practical side too; his conversation with the boy breathes the best nineteenth-century spirit of the duty of making one's life valuable to others. That sentence about working night and day to be useful, and thereby honoring God, is no commonplace for our century, to say nothing of the thirteenth. There is something pretty, too, in the touch of sympathy with the animal world; in some way, he feels that even the birds and beasts must be better off for a good farmer.
These times seem often savage in their cruelties and recklessness of giving pain, but they have a gentle side as well, as may be seen in the tales cited by Montalembert of friendly relations between monks and wild beasts, and in examples collected by Uhland in his essay on the old German animal literature. It is pleasant in connection with such barbarities as we shall presently be reminded of in this very poem to recall the myth versified by Longfellow, of the great minnesinger's legacy to the monastery, conditioned on the brethren's every day placing grain and water for the birds upon his grave; and more than one authentic story is told like that of the Abbot of Hirsan, who, when snow was deep in winter, would take oats from his barn to feed the birds.
After the young Helmbrecht has begged God to release him soon from his father's preaching,—"if you only had been a real preacher you might have got up a whole army with your sermons for a crusade,"—and has explained that instead of keeping on ploughing, he is resolved to have white hands, and no longer need to feel mortified whenever he holds ladies' hands at a dance, his father resorts to his last resource—an appeal to superstition, that he has been keeping in reserve. He tells him what he has been dreaming—three dreams that he interprets as ominous of the loss of sight, feet, and arms, and worst of all, a final dream of one of those sights so common for many centuries before and after, but made no less dreadful by familiarity.