But even in the Minnelieder, Walther has his despondencies. One of the most definite, and possibly conventional, was regret for love’s labour lost, and the days of youth spent in service of an ungracious fair. The poet wonders how it is that he who has helped other men is tongue-tied before his lady. Again, his reflections broaden from thoughts of unresponsive fair ones to a conviction of life’s thanklessness. “I have well served the World (Frau Welt, Society), and gladly would serve her more, but for her evil thanks and her way of preferring fools to me.... Come, World, give me better greeting—the loss is not all mine.” He knows his good unbending temper which will not endure to hear ill spoken of the upright. But he thinks, what is the use? why speak so sweetly, why sing, when virtue and beauty are so lightly held, and every one does evil, fearing nought? The verse which carries these reflections is tossing in the squally haven of Society; soon the poet will encounter the wild sea without. Still from the windy harbour comes one grand lament over art’s decline: “The worst songs please, frogs’ voices! Oh, I laugh from anger! Lady World, no score of mine is on your devil’s slate. Many a life of man and woman have I made glad—might I so have gladdened mine! Here, I make my Will, and bequeath my goods—to the envious my ill-luck, my sorrows to the liars, my follies to false lovers, and to the ladies my heart’s pain.”[17] He makes a solemn offering of his poems: “Good women, worthy men, a loving greeting is my due. Forty years have I sung fittingly of love; and now, take my songs which gladden, as my gift to you. Your favour be my return. And with my staff I will fare on, still wooing worth with undisheartened work, as from my childhood. So shall I be, in lowly lot, one of the Noble—for me enough.”
To relish Walther’s love-songs, one need not know whether she was dark or fair, kept forest-tryst or listened by some castle’s hearth, or in what German land that castle stood. Likewise in his Sprüche, which have other bearing, the roll of his protesting voice carries the universal human. To comprehend them it were well to know that life was then as now niggardly in rewarding virtue; beyond this, one needs to have the type-idea of the Empire and the Papacy, those two powers which were set, somewhat antagonistically, on the decree of God; both claiming the world’s headship; the one, Roman in tradition, but in strength and temper German, and of this world decidedly. The other, Roman in the genius of its organization, and Christian in its subordination of the life below to the life to come, if not in the methods of establishing this consummation; Christian too, but more especially mediaeval, in its formal disdain for whatever belonged to earth. In Germany these two partial opposites were further antagonized, since the native resources recoiled from the foreign drain upon them, and the struggling patriotism of a broken land resented the pressure of a state within and above the state of duke and king and emperor.
In Walther’s time Innocent III. swayed the nations from Peter’s throne. Just before Innocent’s accession, Germany’s able emperor, Henry VI., died suddenly in Sicily (September 1197), leaving an heir not two years old. The queen-mother, dying the next year, bequeathed this child, Frederick, to the paternal care of Innocent, his feudal as well as ghostly lord, since the queen, for herself and child, had accepted the Pope as the feudal suzerain of their kingdom of Sicily. In Germany (using that name loosely and broadly) Philip Hohenstauffen, Henry’s brother and Duke of Suabia, claimed the throne. His unequal opponent was Otto of Brunswick, of the ever-rebellious house of Henry the Lion. The Pope opposed the Hohenstauffen; but was obliged to acknowledge him when the course of the ten years of wasting civil war in Germany decided in his favour—whereupon, alack! Philip was murdered (1207). Quickly the Pope turned back to Otto; but the latter, after he had been crowned king and emperor, became intolerable to Innocent through the compulsion of his position as the head of an empire inherently hostile to the papacy. To thwart him Innocent set up his own ward, Frederick. Soon this precocious youth began to make head against pope-forsaken Otto; and then the excommunicated emperor was overthrown in 1214 by Philip Augustus of France, who had intervened in Frederick’s favour. So Otto passed away, and, some time after, Frederick was crowned German king at Aix-la-Chapelle.[18] In the meanwhile Innocent died (1216), and amity followed between Frederick and the gentle Honorius III., who crowned Frederick emperor at Rome in 1220. This peace ended quickly when the sterner Gregory IX. ascended the papal throne on the death of Honorius in 1227.
Walther’s life extended through these events. Though apparently changing sides under the stress of his necessities, he was patriotically German to the end. First he clave to the Hohenstauffen, Philip, as the true upholder of German interests against Otto and the Pope. On Philip’s death, he turned to Otto; but with all the world left him at last for Frederick. It is known that Walther, an easily angered man, felt himself ill-used by Otto and justified in turning to the open-handed Frederick, who finally gave him a small fief. To the last, Walther upheld him as Germany’s sovereign. Probably the poet died in the year 1228, just as Gregory was succeeding Honorius, and the death-struggle of the Empire with the Papacy was opening.
With no light heart, as well may be imagined, had Walther looked about him on the death of the emperor Henry in 1197. “I sat upon a rock, crossed knee on knee, and with elbow so supported, chin on hand I leaned. Anxiously I pondered. I could see no way to win gain without loss. Honour and riches do not go hand in hand, both of less value than God’s favour. Would I have them all? Alas! riches and worldly honour and God’s favour come not within the closure of one heart’s wishes. The ways are barred; perfidy lurks in secret, and might walks the highroads. Peace and law are wounded.”[19]
The personal dilemma of the poet with his fortune to make, but desirous of doing right, mirrors the desperate situation of the State: “Woe is thee, German tongue; ill stand thy order and thy honour!—I hear the lies of Rome betraying two kings!” And in verses of wrath Walther inveighs against the Pope. The sweeping nature of his denunciation raises the question whether he merely attacked the supposed treachery of the reigning pope, or was opposed to the papacy as an institution hostile to the German nation.
The answer is not clear. Mediaeval denunciations of the Church range from indictments of particular abuses, on through more general invectives, to the clear protests of heretics impugning the ecclesiastical system. It is not always easy to ascertain the speaker’s meaning. Usually the abuse and not the system is attacked. Hostility to the latter, however sweeping the language of satirist or preacher, is not lightly to be inferred. The invectives of St. Bernard and Damiani are very broad; but where had the Church more devoted sons? Even the satirists composing in Old French rarely intended an assault upon her spiritual authority. It would seem as if, at least in the Romance countries, one must look for such hostility to heretical circles, the Waldenses for example. And from the orthodox mediaeval standpoint, this was their most accursed heresy.
It would have been hard for any German to use broader language than some of the French satirists and Latin castigators. If there was a difference, it must be sought in the specific matter of the German disapproval viewed in connection with the political situation. Was a position ever taken incompatible with the Church’s absolute spiritual authority? or one intrinsically irreconcilable with the secular power of the papacy? At any time, in any country, papal claims might become irreconcilable with the royal prerogative—as William the Conqueror had held those of Gregory VII. in England, and as, two centuries afterwards, Philip the Fair was to hold those of Boniface VIII. in France. But in neither case was there such sheer and fundamental antagonism as men felt to exist between the Empire and the Papacy. Perhaps it was possible in the early thirteenth century for a German whose whole heart was on the German side to dispute even the sacerdotal principle of papal authority. It is hard to judge otherwise of Freidank, the very German composer or collector of trenchant sayings in the early thirteenth century. Many of these sneer at Rome and the Pope, and some of them strike the gist of the matter: “Sunde nieman mac vergeben wan Got alein” (“God alone can forgive sins”). This is the direct statement; he gives its scornful converse: “Could the Pope absolve me from my oaths and duties, I’d let other sureties go and fasten to him alone.”[20] Such words mean denial of the Church’s authority to forgive, and the Pope’s to grant absolution from oaths of allegiance. Freidank is very near rejecting the principles of the ecclesiastical system.
Walther, Freidank’s contemporary, is more picturesque: “King Constantine, he gave so much—as I will tell you—to the Chair of Rome: spear, cross, and crown. At once the angels cried: ‘Alas! Alas! Alas! Christendom before stood crowned with righteousness. Now is poison fallen on her, and her honey turned to gall—sad for the world henceforth!’ To-day the princes all live in honour; only their highest languishes—so works the priest’s election. Be that denounced to thee, sweet God! The priests would upset laymen’s rights: true is the angels’ prophecy.”[21]
On Constantine’s apocryphal gift, symbolized by the emblems of Christ’s passion, rested the secular authority of the popes, which Walther laments with the angels. “The Chair of Rome was first set up by Sorcerer Gerbert! [Queer history this, but we see what he means.] He destroyed his own soul only; but this one would bring down Christendom with him to perdition. When will all tongues call Heaven to arms, and ask God how long He will sleep? They bring to nought His work, distort His Word. His steward steals His treasure; His judge robs here and murders there; His shepherd has become a wolf among His sheep.”[22] The clergy point their fingers heavenward while they travel fast to hell.[23] How laughs the Pope at us, when at home with his Italians, at the way he empties our German pockets into his “poor boxes.”[24] Walther’s hatred of the foreign Pope is roused at every point. And at last, in a Spruch full of implied meaning, he declares that Christ’s word as to the tribute money meant that the emperor should receive his royal due.[25]