Indeed! Yet we are told in other parts that the landlords of those times not only made their pleasures their chief consideration, but wrung by violence the last groschen from the peasant's hand in order to procure them. At p. 55, vol. ii., after an account of the pleasures of the kings and nobles, we have the following description of the peasant:—"And what, then, was the condition of the people all this while? 'Look here upon this picture and on this!' All taxes and imposts fell, as a matter of course, on the lower orders; the humble citizen, the laborious peasant, had to toil and earn by the sweat of his brow, not his own daily bread, but the means of luxurious indulgence to his insolent masters; yet if the wild boar came tearing up his fields and vineyards, and the knight and his followers dashed after him with a troop of horsemen dogs, he had no redress, and dared not even kill the beast, lest he should interfere with the pleasures of his lord.... New methods and pretences for extorting money from the people were devised every day."
It would be easy to multiply similar quotations. The landlords of ancient times, with whom it was plainly intimated we could bear no flattering comparison, are held up, we see, to complete reprobation.
The difference between the bad landlord of ancient and of modern times, (for we presume the good and the bad, the wheat and the tares, were sown together then as now,) we believe to be this. The modern bad landlord takes his rent—a rent obtained often by a ruinous competition for the soil—and thinks no more of the matter; thinks nothing of the tenant, whether he has offered a higher rent than he can well pay, or of the labourer, whether the wages he receives are sufficient to support him in health. The ancient bad landlord was a positive extortioner; he did look after his tenants or his serfs—to see if there was any thing more he could take from them; he looked into the roost for the last hen, and behind the barn-door for the last egg. When we censure the modern landlord for being an absentee, reckless of his tenantry, we in fact tacitly demand from him a higher strain of virtue than we exact from other wealthy classes, who are allowed to receive without inquiry, and expend without control, the utmost income which fortune and the laws have given them. He is at worst the "sluggard king," indifferent to a world of which he knows nothing, and absorbed only in the pursuit of his own pleasures. But the bad landlord of feudal times had the active vices of the robber and the tyrant.
Let no one study the middle ages in the hope—which some seem to entertain—of extracting from them the lesson peculiarly applicable to ourselves. The feudal times are utterly past. Some of their forms, or some shadow of their forms, may still linger amongst us; but their spirit is as utterly past as that which animated an Athenian democracy, or the court of the Great King. We must study our duty as citizens, as Christians, in the circumstances around us, in the eternal Writing before us: we shall gain nothing by the fantastic gloss, with its grotesque illuminations, which the middle ages supply. This turning and struggling towards the past is but the backward looking of those whom the current is still carrying down the stream: it were wiser to look before, and on either side of them; they will better see whither they are going.—
It will perhaps be thought that throughout these volumes the sympathies of the authoress are a little too chameleon-like,—somewhat too mobile, and take their changeful hue from the immediate subject, or the last light thrown upon it. Now the knight, with his faith in God and his own right arm, his self-reliance, his daring and devotion, claims from the lady, as is most just, his meed of applause. But by-and-by she catches him upon his marauding expedition, the ruthless spoliator of the burgher, the contemptuous oppressor of the artisan; and she does not spare her censure. One moment she appears to join in the regret that the age of chivalry is gone! The next moment the same phrase rings differently, and when contemplating the oppressed condition of the peasantry, she rejoices that the age of chivalry is gone! In one part she makes honourable mention of the training the youthful nobleman received in the halls of the great, where he acted as page; but cannot, in another part, refrain from a little satire on this very system of training. "Noble young gentlemen," she says p. 32, "who would not to save their lives have employed themselves in any useful art or manufacture, had no objection to lay cloths, carry up dishes, wait at table, hold horses, and lead them to the stables; and noble young ladies did not disdain to perform many of the offices of a chambermaid at a hotel, for a knightly guest."
We note this versatility of feeling, but hardly for the purpose of blaming it; for indeed it is the peculiar characteristic of the middle ages thus to play with our sympathies. They present so many and such different phases, their institutions are capable of being viewed under such opposite lights, that it requires more care and watchfulness than is perhaps consistent with simple honesty of thought and feeling, to preserve one's self from these fluctuations of sentiment. One who yields unaffectedly to the genuine impressions which the history of this period produces, will find his Ohs and his Hahs breaking out in a very contradictory manner. That knight, with lance at rest which challenges the whole fighting world—whatever can be tilted at,—who would not be that knight? But the man cannot read; and thinks an old woman can bewitch him by her spells, and that his priest, by some spell also, can absolve him. That monk, with folded arms over a heart so well folded too—who would not be that monk? But the man has mingled asceticism with his piety till he knows not which is which; and let a woman in her youth and beauty traverse his path, he crosses himself, as if not the angel of this world, but the demon of another had appeared before him. In looking at these phantasmagoria of the past, we must be content to see and to feel for the moment; there is no stereotyped expression of face with which we can regard the whole.
We have soon exhausted our critical cavils, and shall look at leisure through these volumes for some of those points which interested us during their perusal. Amongst the first things we had noted for quotation is an account of our old friend Gotz von Berlichingen—him of the Iron Hand—which we somehow liked the better for there being no allusion to the drama of Goethe. Nobody whom the information could in the least interest, needed to be told that it was the hero of the drama whose real life and adventures he was getting acquainted with. We find, however, on re-perusal, that this account is too long to be extracted: we leave it untouched for those who peruse the work; and shall make our first quotation from the description of the Hanse Towns. Here is a curious passage, which shows that the mere collecting together in towns, and making some advance in the great art of money-getting, is no guarantee against superstitions as gross and ridiculous as any that haunt the boor in his cottage.
"With the horrors of superstition in the punishment of witches and the like, most readers are familiar enough; and such as occur in the registers of these cities, have little to distinguish them from similar occurrences elsewhere. Sometimes, indeed, there is an entry somewhat more noteworthy; as, for instance, of the arrival of 'The Wandering Jew' at the Isar gate of the city of Munich. It appears, that this rather remarkable visitor was not allowed to enter the city, but he told those who went to see him that he had been seven times round the world, and on being shown a picture of the Saviour, readily vouched for the likeness.
"Another entry concerns a certain wolf, who had committed terrible havoc, so that the country people, even at mid-day, were afraid to cross the fields; but a still greater consternation was created when the discovery was made that the wolf was no other than a certain deceased burgomaster of unhappy memory, who as every body knew, had stood looking out of an upper window of his house to watch his own funeral. The night-watchman was ready to swear to his identity; and as, putting all things together, no doubt existed any longer in the mind of any reasonable person, the formidable wolf, when taken, instead of being disposed of in the usual manner, was hung on a high gallows, in a brown wig, and a long gray beard, by way of completing his likeness to the burgomaster."—(P. 95.)
Those who indulge in, or applaud practical jests, should read on farther in the same chapter (p. 102.) We heartily wish that the professors of this species of wit were every one of them conducted in his turn into the "Paradise" here described; of which it may be sufficient to intimate that "it was provided with a bench and a good store of rods."