Flowers from Mediæval History

by Minnie D. Kellogg

Of course, there are braver, fuller, happier lives than a nun’s, and there always have been. But during the Age of Faith, in a religious house, there was always a haven of rest for the idealist, while now it sometimes seems he has not where to lay his head.

It was not in the Middle Ages that the king said, “If poets will be poets, why, let them starve.” Then, on the contrary, the public fed a vagabond population of vagabond singers who sang a certain grace into the Romance languages; for the devotees of various abstractions there was the refuge of holy orders. After taking up the religious life, if they had force enough to arrange the conditions around them to fit their desires, they might safely follow their various bents, for good or ill, undisturbed by care for the future, their bodies being insured against want, their souls against punishment. In Spain, particularly, really great men and successful ones continued to take holy orders even up to the eighteenth century.

In his prime, Calderon exchanged the position of superintendent of the royal theatre for royal chaplain, but after a few qualms on the point he continued to write plays on much the same order as before, only they were performed by priests. Since Calderon was really orthodox the arrangement seems natural enough; as a playwright he had baffled with the public till he was fifty-one years old; in the church at least he was relieved from the dictates of public tastes. There it was that he probably wrote his beautiful “Magic Magician.”

I am not a Ruskinite. I would not, if I conveniently could, domesticate the thirteenth century in the nineteenth; but I do believe in a sympathetic attitude toward history, as toward present life, and for the same reasons I would not turn the light of the twentieth century in upon the gloom of the sixteenth, with the idea of getting a clear picture. I for one do not feel that a convent was the saddest place for Sister Marcela. That power which decrees the fall of nations had its hand upon Spain. Wars, the Americas, the religious houses and the Inquisition, had fed on the flower of the nation too long. The times were out of joint. It seemed beautiful to little Marcela to lose such a world and gain a soul. Being a poet, the heroic side of the church appealed to her; in her intensity she joined the barefooted order of the Trinity. How did her father part from her? He was a poet, too—did he give her up with holy joy and homely sorrow?

In his way, Lope de Vega was a really religious man, for he lived in close touch with his God—the literal, limited, jealous god of a fanatic, it is true. Would you see its exact image, as shown on the Market Place? Then read “The Marriage of the Soul to Divine Love,” a broadly realistic drama, in which Lope de Vega supposes the bridegroom to be the Savior. It was acted on the great Square of Valencia on the occasion of the marriage of Philip III, the dramatist himself being the clown in the cast.

But, too, this vulgar “familiar of the holy office” can be tender. Listen to these lines, dedicated to his little dead son:—

“Holy angels and blest, Through these palms as ye sweep, Hold their branches at rest, For my babe is asleep.

“And ye Bethlehem palm trees, As stormy winds rush In tempest and fury, Your angry noise hush;— Move gently, move gently, Restrain your wild sweep; Hold your branches at rest,— My babe is asleep.

“My babe all divine, With earth’s sorrows oppressed, Seeks in slumber an instant His grieving to rest; He slumbers,—he slumbers,— Oh hush, then, and keep Your branches all still,— My babe is asleep!

“Cold blasts wheel about him,— A rigorous storm,— And ye see how, in vain, I would shelter his form;— Holy angels and blest, As above me ye sweep, Hold these branches at rest,— My babe is asleep!”