[SCHOLARS EN DÉSHABILLÉ.]
Scholars before the world and scholars at home are often the greatest contrast to themselves. Daily life is, after all, so levelling that it makes a tabula rasa of crowned heads and peasants, of sages and fools, of good men and bad. There is no visible nimbus round the head of the man who towers above his fellows, as there is round the summit of the mountain that pierces the clouds. Without the conventional distinctions of costumes, attendance, or display, there is no means of telling the man of giant intellect from the man of common attainments. Not that some men lack that physical superiority which at once causes a stranger to turn eagerly round and ask, “Who is that?” but this mark so often accompanies other men whose interior life does not justify its presence, or whose career has been a mistake and a failure, that it is practically valueless. The outward sign or “ticket” requisite to denote a man of acknowledged station is therefore as necessary in this blind world as it is humiliating to the world’s sense of discernment. Take an imaginary procession of magnates, financial, political, artistic, royal, or noble, dress them in plain citizen’s garb, and then send in a child to pick out the prizes among them, to distinguish the bishop from the chancellor, the diplomatist from the banker, the king from the scholar. Guided by purely natural instinct (not unlike that which presided at the election of barbarian chieftains in the Vth century), the child will call the tallest, strongest, manliest personage the king, and will choose the most venerable, gentle, and serious as the bishop. Ten to one it will have taken a soldier for king, and an artist for bishop; and so on ad infinitum. Now place those great people in suitable coaches, dress them in appropriate robes, put on them the crowns, coronets, crosses, and insignia of their order, and the veriest baby will recognize by the conventional instinct of civilization the rank and importance of each; only it will then be seen that the king is that quiet man of banker-like aspect, the bishop yonder retiring individual with a bald head, the financier that dandy with the unobtrusive gold ring and faultless yet severe costume, the ambassador that commonplace-looking person hidden under stars and ribbons. Change the slide once more, set all these good people down at their respective homes, and look through the magic-lantern again. What do we see? A dining-room, a table set with more or less perfection of appointments, a few noiseless servants and romping children, a homely, middle-aged matron, serene and placid, perhaps looking over an account-book or hemming pocket-handkerchiefs. The bishop’s household alone will wear a distinctive mark, but, compared with other ecclesiastical abodes, will keep its master’s secrets as well as any secular one. God alone knows where to point to a saint or a genius among these ordinary surroundings, and the objects of his discernment would often surprise any human observer who should be admitted to share his knowledge.
The craving which men have to know the details of the private life of any one distinguished from the commonalty by talent or position is an inexplicable phenomenon, and one that to the end will defy our solution and persist in remaining in force long after we have decided that it has no business to exist. Is it that we are envious of everything above us, and wish to dim its glory by putting it to the same test as our own dull being? Is it through a morbid desire to analyze that which, against our will, enchants us, in order that, having done so, and reduced it to various elements which separately are powerless to charm, we may depreciate the whole? Or is it through that loftier feeling that urges us to ally ourselves by sympathy with all that is noble and exalted in human nature? Do we long to claim at least a fellowship with intellect through the sacred instincts which intellect and mediocrity share alike? It is unfortunately as often through the baser as through the nobler feeling; and yet, when we have sifted the tendency to its simplest elements, we cannot say that we have personally rid ourselves of the foible or learned the lesson of lofty incuriousness which by implication we have taught.
The daily life and privations, the struggles and successes, the domestic joys, sorrows, and losses of great men have a deeper meaning than shows on the surface; for not only have they influenced the works or writings through which these men have become known to us, but they show how independent of outward circumstances is their greatness. In this sense, they present encouragement to many in whom the same qualities are latent, but who from faintheartedness might otherwise have neglected their gifts and wasted their powers. They teach yet another lesson; for in them we see what compensations the mind gives in the midst of even sordid trials, and how the higher a man’s intellectual training is, so much the stronger is his moral endurance. But draw what moral we will from them, the interest in them remains and will remain to the end of time. Trivial as they are, too, they somehow fix the personality of a man of genius better in the mind of posterity than his greatest virtues or doughtiest deeds; as, for instance, King Alfred is better remembered as the disguised soldier burning the cakes of his peasant-hostess than as the wise lawgiver and heroic chieftain of the Saxons. Prince Charlie’s romantic escapes have endeared him to the Scottish heart and made him the centre of the later traditions of a romantic people, while no such halo gathers round the person of the First or Second Charles of England, even though the “Martyr-King” has won by his tragical death a separate niche in the Valhalla of history.
In all ages and all climes, learning and wealth have seldom gone together. Anecdotes of scholars whose daily wants were in sad contrast with their aspirations abound in the records of all centres of learning. Dr. Newman, in his lectures on universities, has given us many touching as well as ludicrous examples of this truth. Among the disciples of Pythagoras, if we recollect accurately, was one Cleanthes, a professional boxer from Corinth, who, smitten with a love of wisdom, came to Athens to become a philosopher. As he had not even the trifling daily sum required by the professor of learning, he spent half of each day in earning it by carrying water and doing such like services to the citizens, while the remaining hours he passed at the academy. One day, the wind blew his upper garment open, and his luckier companions most “unphilosophically” jeered him when they saw that his outer covering was all that he had. He afterwards rose to great proficiency, and taught a school of his own—never, however, discarding his simple ways. The well-known story of the three students who had but one cloak between them and wore it each in his turn in the lecture-hall while the others stayed in bed, is told of Athenians as well as Saxons, Irish, or Italians in the universities of the middle ages. Bp. Vaughan’s Life of S. Thomas abounds with such anecdotes of impecunious and enthusiastic scholars. S. Thomas himself, it is related, wrote his Summa (not the great work, but a previous and less comprehensive book) on such stray pieces of parchment, old letters, torn covers, etc., as he could pick up or beg from his fellow-students. S. Richard of Canterbury, when teaching in his chair at Oxford, was so careless of his honorarium that he generally left it on the window-sill, unless he had need of it to relieve some poor person. The same saint in his youth was sometimes so frozen to the bone that he could not continue his studies and was fain to run round the court of the school for half an hour every night to restore circulation before he went to bed. The Oxford students suffered hunger as well as cold in the service of philosophy, for they often had no other resource than to beg the broken victuals from the tables of the tradesmen, and one of them avers in a private letter that, on a great holiday, he and his friends made merry over an unusual feast—“a penny piece of beef between four.”
In Paris, the case was the same. The lay students suffered most, for each of the great religious orders had its own representative house, and the young religious lived in community. Among the seculars it was different; they were quartered on the citizens, and, when they were honest as well as industrious, led a terribly hard life. They lodged in garrets, and lay on straw; their landlords extorted from them exorbitant rents for their share of the filthy tenement, and they often had to depend on charity for their food. Ingenious as poverty always is, it suggested remedies to these harassed votaries of learning, even as it has in all succeeding ages. The poorer students took to copying books and selling them at starvation prices, working for others when they could find patrons, for themselves when they were forced to do so. Thus originated bookstalls and private shops for the sale of books, parchment, wax, and ink. In the dark days of winter, the want of light was severely felt by those who were too poor to buy oil, and pale, shivering forms might be seen huddled in doorways, grouped on corners, or gathered round a street-shrine, anywhere, in fact, where a lamp could be found, all intent on their notes of yesterday’s lecture, or busily examining the subject of to-morrow’s lesson. Beside them was ever the other world of students—the gay, rich, and careless: those who spent in one night’s revel what would have bought parchment and oil for six months for the thrifty, hard-working copyist of MSS. But what martyrdoms were undergone for knowledge’s sake in those days of earnest search after science no man can tell. Knowing less of the details of mediæval life than we do of the daily needs of later generations, we can perhaps hardly appreciate the degree of privation endured by these sturdy knowledge-seekers.
Turning to the chivalrous land of Germany, we find, in the same century as that of S. Thomas and the students of Paris University, the school of poor minstrels, the famous Minnesingers. Kroeger, in his work on them and their novel art, says: “These singers led a life most strange and romantic. At a time when cities had as yet barely come into existence in Germany, and the castles of the lords were the chief gathering-places of the vast floating population of the Crusading times, these Minnesingers, with little or nothing besides their sword, fiddle, or harp and some bit of love-ribbon or the like from their sweetheart, wandered from village to village, and castle to castle, everywhere welcomed with gladness, and receiving their expected remuneration with the proud unconcern of strolling vagabonds.... For these singing knights felt no more delicacy in chronicling the good things they received from their patrons than in immortalizing the meanness of those who let them depart without gifts of clothing, food, and money.... The young knight was by custom compelled to saunter forth into the world, and generally by poverty to keep on sauntering in this fashion all his lifetime. Then he perfected himself in the art of composing songs and playing some stringed instrument, which became both a source of infinite enjoyment and an unfailing source of revenue if the knight was poor. With his art, he paid his boarding-bills; his art furnished him with clothes, horses, and equipments. More than all, his art won him the love of his lady.”
Walther von der Vogelweide—“bird’s pasture or meadow”—was one of the foremost of these wandering troubadours, and, as he himself tells us, was very poor. He went to Austria to better his fortunes by the knightly art alone fit for one of gentle birth, and among his patrons found one, the Duke of Kärnten, whose meanness has come down to posterity, through the then obscure minstrel’s verse, in having “withheld a promised suit of new clothes” from the poet.
Walther’s best luck seems to have been his appointment as tutor to the son of the Emperor Frederic II. This led to his being given a small estate with fixed income; but he had struggled long enough in gay though hopeless poverty before fortune singled him out for her favors. As usual, his mind was far beyond the standard of his circumstances; a thinker, philosopher, observer of human nature, an active member of the state when he participated in political duties, a conscientious patriot and a true Catholic. In politics he never refused to recognize whatever merits the opposite party held, nor to denounce any injustice on the part of his own; in religion, he was always alive to the abuses of the time, despite his devout faith and earnest worship. Kroeger says of him that, though but “little tainted by the prejudices of nationality, he is, in his thorough earnestness and rare purity of spirit, even more truly a representative German than either Goethe or Schiller.” Of later authors, poets, artists, there are ampler memoirs left to teach us the inner and darker life of the spirit we know in this bright public envelope. The Greeks, who held that all free-born men, Hellenes by descent, had a right to become learned and elegant scholars, and who upon this theory based their practice of having slaves to do that work which did not comport with the calm attitude of mind necessary to philosophical study, made use of very cogent arguments, humanly speaking. It remained for Christianity to do something more sublime yet than to devote an entire class of men to lofty aims and studies; it was reserved for Christ’s law to change even menial pursuits and vulgar necessities into employments fit for the highest intellect. The soul’s sanctification became a loftier aim than the cultivation of the mind alone, and every office, however lowly, was made capable of ministering to this new aim. Thus was the stigma which the pagan world had set upon poverty and dependence removed, but the fact of poverty was to remain for ever. Just as by his death our Lord had taken away, not the fact of death, but “its sting, its victory,” and its ignominy, so by his life he took all bitterness from that inevitable condition of the majority of mankind—physical need and suffering.