How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
What, one may ask, is the reason for this unanimity of outlook? Why do the people see a nun only as a love-bird shut within a cage and beating its wings against the bars? Partly, no doubt, because such songs always “dally with the innocence of love”; the folk are capable of a deep melancholy, as of a gaiety which is light as thistledown; but Love is and was their lord and king, and so even the nun must be in love when they sing her. It may be, however, that there is a deeper meaning in the chansons de nonnes. The nunneries were aristocratic; the ideal of the religious life was out of the reach of women who lived among fields and beasts of the field. These spinsters and these knitters in the sun, who seem so gay and peaceful, we know what their lives were like:
Poure folke in cotes,
Charged with children, and chef lordes rente,
That thei with spynnynge may spare spenen hit in hous-hyre,
Bothe in mylk and in mele to make with papelotes[1551];
carding and combing, clouting and washing, suffering much hunger and woe in winter time; no time to think, and hardly time to pray; but always time to sing. “The wo of those women that wonyeth in cotes” solaced itself in song; but when the echo of the convent bell came to the singer at her clouting, or to her husband, as he drove his plough over the convent acres, they recognised a peace which was founded upon their labours and which, though it could not exist without them, they could never share[1552]. If the songs which the slaves of Athens sang among themselves in the slave quarter at night had come down to us, they would surely have thrown a new light upon those grave philosophers, artists and statesmen, to whom the world owes almost all that it cherishes of wisdom and of beauty. Nor would the Athenians be less great because we knew the slaves. Even so it is no derogation to the monastic ideal to say that the common people, shut out of it, looked at it differently from the great churchmen, who praised it; and, unlike those of the Athenian slaves, their songs still live. The popular mind (these songs would seem to say) had little sympathy for that career in which the daughters of the people had no share. It is immaterial whether they looked upon it with the eye of the fox in the fable, declaring that the grapes were sour, or whether the lusty common sense of those living close to nature gave them a contempt for the bloodless ecstasies they could not understand. At all events the cloister mirrored in their songs is a prison and a grave:
Mariez-vous, les filles,
Avec ces bons drilles,
Et n’allez jà, les filles,
Pourrir derrièr’ les grilles[1553].
That was how the people and the nightingale envisaged it; and no mystic will be the less wise for pondering that brutal last line, the eternal revolt of common sense against asceticism.
All over western and southern Europe this theme was set to music, now with gaiety and insouciance, now with bitterness. The wandering clerk goes singing on his way:
| Plangit nonna fletibus Inenarrabilibus, Condolens gemitibus Dicens consocialibus: Heu misella! Nichil est deterius Tali vita, Cum enim sim petulans Et lasciva. | The nun is complaining, Her tears are down raining, She sobbeth and sigheth, To her sisters she crieth: Misery me! O what can be worse than this life that I dree, When naughty and lovelorn, and wanton I be. |
And he can tell the nun’s desire
| Pernoctando vigilo Cum non vellem Iuvenem amplecterer Quam libenter![1554] | All the night long I unwillingly wake, How gladly a lad in mine arms would I take. |