Transcriber’s Note:

Minor errors, attributable to the printer, have been corrected. Please see the transcriber’s [note] at the end of this text for details regarding the handling of any issues encountered during its preparation.

Any corrections appear in the text as links to the table of errata in that endnote.Any corrections appear in the text as corrected. The original text is displayed when the mouse is placed on the corrected text.

Footnotes have been gathered at the end of each chapter, and are linked for easy reference.

A cover image has been prepared, based on the title page and is added to the public domain.

THE END OF
THE MIDDLE AGES

ESSAYS AND QUESTIONS IN HISTORY

BY

A. MARY F. ROBINSON

(Madame James Darmesteter)

London

T FISHER UNWIN

26 Paternoster Square

MDCCCLXXXIX

Dedication.

My dear Mr. Symonds,—I send you a little book; different from the many volumes, plump with documents and the dignity of History, which I intended for you long ago. But, since I have no better thing to offer, take—dear Master—these rough and scattered pages. For to whom, if not to you, should I dedicate the book? When I look back, I see you at my side in all my studies; for the last ten years, there is not one of them which has not been confided to you, and, most of all, my dreams of History. So that whatever I write belongs in some sort to you; but especially this little volume of which we talked so much in your study at Davos two years ago. Do you remember how you guided me through the innumerable pages of Litta and of Muratori in quest of the secret of the French Claim to Milan? We did not find much of that, but we found so many better things; and, best of all, the happy hours which you illuminated! Hours in which you evoked for me, as we plunged deeper and deeper into your Chronicles, the great figures of the Past. At first they rose before me, pale and mute—silent and immaculate as the white recesses of your Alps; but, at the touch of your wand, they assumed their ancient colour and consistence—the very smile, the gait, the accent, the passions, that had moved them once beneath this sun that has survived them; their voices magically issued out of the silent yellow pages; the sound of their battles clashed anew along your windless valleys and eagle-haunted mountain tops. And, once alive, they remained alive for me.

As I sat and wondered, a new desire awoke in me, an eager wish to seize these brilliant apparitions, to strip them of their faded purple, to strip them of their form and colour, to lay them bare to their innermost tissue and catch the reason and the secret of their being.

And, first of all, to understand exactly what they did, and when, and why. Our beautiful chronicles were not always quite precise. I began to see that what I wanted must be sought in manuscripts and foreign archives. And, half afraid, I told[I told] you of my project for exchanging a cheerful holiday in Switzerland against a week or two of dull research in Paris. Since then I have worked long and hard, in Paris, in London, in Florence, and the writing of dead hands has grown familiar to me; but I have never forgotten that it was first in the solitude of your lofty valley, that my task grew plain before my mind. And now to whom, if not to you should I offer these scattered ruins of the thing undone—these first ineffectual sketches of that History of the French in Italy, which still I mean to write? From Davos they took their flight; let them seek the nest again!

If I had better profited by your lessons and your example, it would not have been a mere sheaf of fragments that I should have offered you to-day, but a Book, a solid and coherent whole consistently animated, in all the complexity and the unity of its subject, by an epoch, an idea, a man, or an event. Nothing else is really durable, permanently useful. It is true that I have tried (and may the candour of this avowal excuse its weakness!)—yes, I have tried, after the manner of essayists, to give an apparent unity to my fragments by means of a title, large and comfortable as the cloak of charity which covers in its vague expanse a host of strangers.

For, after all, what has Schwester Katrei to do with Charles VIII., or Isotta of Rimini with Mechtild of Magdeburg? Shall I avow that the volume is really the fragmentary essays towards two unwritten histories—one of the house of Hohenstaufen, the other of the French in Italy? Also I can imagine you remarking that, from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth, my Middle Ages take long a-dying:

“Les gens que vous tuez se portent assez bien.”

And you might add that in a book on the end of the Middle Ages, it is strange to find not a line on the Loss of Constantinople, and not a chapter on the invention of Printing or the Discovery of America.

What can I do but acknowledge my incompleteness? Nay, I will even confess to you that I have my private doubts whether the Middle Ages are over yet—whether any period comes to an end at a given epoch, but does not rather still subsist, diminished yet puissant, stealing in unnoticed currents along the vast veins and secret fabric of the world. In many a turn of thought and habit, in many a disregarded constitution—in May Day and Manor Court, in the Land laws and the Judenhetze—the Middle Ages are not over yet. Here and there they reappear and startle us in unexpected corners. That form of Nature which we know as History is, like every other evolution of Nature, too complex to be accurately fixed in words. Words only give the vague surroundings; they are the ill-fitting, ready-made clothes of a thought.

Therefore, despite their official end, we may doubt whether we be done with the Middle Ages. And yet you will agree with me that the personages of my essays belong no longer wholly to the age in which they lived. Something came to an end then; something slowly began. Race of Cain and race of Abel, mystics lost in ecstasy, or captains of prey and plunder,—yet Eckhart, the forerunner of Hegel, and the sinister Giangaleazzo dreaming in a different fashion the dream of Count Cavour, was each unconsciously a precursor of the Modern Age.

The Beguines, bringing the dissolvent of mysticism to the authority of Rome; the Pope, in quitting his true capital for Avignon; the Cardinals by opening the Schism: these, between them, have invented the Reformation.... Giangaleazzo Visconti, when he made his daughter of Orleans his heir, prepared the battles of Marignano and Pavia, and condemned Francis I. to his captivity in Spain. Even as the Feud of Orleans and Burgundy began the long rivalry of Francis and the Emperor, the great descendants of those angry houses.... Meanwhile the numerous invasions of Italy under the Dukes of Orleans, and still later, the triumphal journey of Charles VIII., brought back to France the splendour of the Renaissance. Thus Hallam closes the Middle Ages with the taking of Naples, in 1494. However this be, if you are indulgent, dear Master, you may consider my essays a very humble and inadequate Introduction to the study of your Sixteenth Century.

Perhaps I am the only reader who will have learned anything from the little book. And, after all, I am contented that it should be so. It is so much pleasanter to learn than to instruct; and in learning one meets with so many friends and helpers. I cannot tell you here of all who have befriended me, but I must at least mention to you the names of Canon Creighton, unfailing critic and sympathizer; of Mr. Bryce, who reached out an experienced hand to me and spared me several more mistakes in Feudal Law; of Mr. H.F. Brown of Venice, who procured me my Venetian transcripts; of Professor Villari and Professor Paoli of Florence (it was the latter who taught me Palæography); and of Comte Albert de Circourt of Paris, in whom I have found a quite invaluable adviser and correspondent,—for probably no historian in Europe is so familiar with the Lombard schemes of Louis d’Orléans as he.

To you I owe the largest debt of all. It is not only for the writing of a book I thank you here--

Ever sincerely yours,

A. MARY F. DARMESTETER.

Contents.

The Beguines and the Weaving
Brothers.[^[1]]

I.

With the approach of the thirteenth century, the world awoke from its long and dreamless sleep. Then began the age of faith, the miraculous century, starving for lack of bread and nourished upon heavenly roses. St. Louis and St. Elizabeth, Dominic the eloquent and the fiery Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas and Francis the glorioso poverello di Dio, proclaim the enthusiastic spirit of the age. It is an age of chivalry no less in religion than in love, an age whose somewhat strained and mystical conception of virtue is sweetened by a new strong impulse of human pity. The world begins to see; and the green growth of the earth, the birds of the air, the fishes of the sea, become clear and noticeable things in the eyes of the saints. The world awakes and feels. Jean de Matha and Félix de Valois, gentlemen of Meaux, visit the prisons of France, and redeem many hundred captives from Morocco. On all sides men begin to love the sick, the poor, the sinful; even to long for sickness and poverty, as if in themselves they were virtuous; even to wonder whether sin and evil may not be a holy means for mortifying spiritual pride. To rescue the captive, to feed the hungry, to nurse the leper, as unawares Elizabeth of Hungary tended Christ in her Thuringian city—this is the new ideal of mankind. And this age of feeling is no less an age of speculation, of metaphysical inquiry, of manifold heresies and schisms. No new Bernard stops with his earnest dogma the thousand theories which everywhere arise and spread.

The modern age has begun. The saints of the preceding years had been men of a more militant or monastic turn, dogmatic minds like Bernard of Clairvaux, Norbert, Thomas à Becket. The era of charity and speculative thought begins when the twelfth century is drawing near the close.

From the last year of the eleventh century until the Christians were finally driven out of Syria in 1291, there had been scarcely a break in the continual crusade. Throughout the twelfth century this enthusiasm of pity for the dead Redeemer left in the hands of infidels was maintained at fever heat. Later it was softened and widened by the new spirit of charity towards ailing and erring humankind. But during the first hundred years of the Holy War it absorbed all that was holiest and purest, most ardent and noblest in European manhood. All went to fall upon the fields of Palestine, or to return strangely altered after many years. France, England, Germany, and Flanders, each in her turn commanded the pious host; but just as these countries were glorious in the East were they barren and empty at home. Whole districts of corn land and pasture lapsed again into moss and marsh. Whole countrysides were thinned of their hale and active men. A vast distress and indigence spread over Europe. Those were hard years for desolate women. Their spinning and broidery could not buy them bread, and bitter was the effort to live until their bread-winners returned. Even when the armies came back from Palestine there were many who did not return: many had died of strange Asiatic pestilences, many had not survived the long journey; the bones of some were bleached on the desert sand, and others whitened in the sea. And some of them had gained the crown which every pious soul then strove and yearned to win. They had fallen, as Mechtild of Magdeburg wished to fall, their heart’s blood streaming under the feet of heathen. And when the thinned and feeble ranks of the survivors came to their own country, a very dreadful cry went up from all the destitute widows in Europe.

Cruel indeed was their condition. Some, truly, sought for rest and quiet in the cloister; but in those days the cloister was death to the world. The charitable orders of Francis and Dominic were as yet undreamed of. Only the great meditative orders offered absolute renunciation and absolute seclusion. Timid and clinging hearts could not so utterly forego their world; many busy energetic spirits felt no vocation for the dreamy quiet of the cloistered nun. And for these the world was hard. They must beg the bread which their labour could very seldom earn. One dreadful trade indeed, which the desires of men leave ever open to the despair of women, one trade found many followers. But there were pure and holy women, and venerable women, and dying women, who could not live in sin. And there might be seen in every market-place miserable and hungry petitioners, crying, “For God’s sake, give us bread; bread for the love of Christ!”

Swestrones Brod durch Got. Sisters of bread for the sake of God. The name often strikes us in later writing. The singular title has become familiar. For when we read of piteous uncloistered piety, and when we read of humble merit rebuking the sins of arrogant Churchmen, and in the account of strange mystical heresies, and in the lists of interdicts and burnings, we shall often meet in the monkish Latin of Germany and Flanders that outlandish phrase: we shall hear again of the Swestrones Brod durch Got.

II.

In the year 1180, there lived in Liege a certain kindly, stammering priest, known from his infirmity as Lambert le Bègue. This man took pity on the destitute widows of his town. Despite the impediment in his speech, he was, as often happens, a man of a certain power and eloquence in preaching. His words, difficult to find, brought conviction when they came. This Lambert so moved the hearts of his hearers that gold and silver poured in on him, given to relieve such of the destitute women of Liege as were still of good and pious life. With the moneys thus collected, Lambert built a little square of cottages, with a church in the middle and a hospital, and at the side a cemetery. Here he housed these homeless widows, one or two in each little house, and then he drew up a half-monastic rule which was to guide their lives. The rule was very simple, quite informal: no vows, no great renunciation bound the Swestrones Brod durch Got. A certain time of the day was set apart for prayer and pious meditation; the other hours they spent in spinning or sewing, in keeping their houses clean, or they went as nurses in time of sickness into the homes of the townspeople. They were bidden to be obedient; and to be chaste so long as they remained of the sisterhood, but they might marry again at will with no disgrace. If rich women chose to join the new and unsanctioned guild, they might leave a portion of their riches to any heir they chose. Thus these women, though pious and sequestered, were still in the world and of the world; they helped in its troubles, and shared its afflictions, and at choice they might rejoin the conflict.

Soon we find the name Swestrones Brod durch Got set aside for the more usual title of Beguines, or Beghines. Different authorities give different origins for this word. Some, too fantastic, have traced the name to St. Begge, a holy nun of the seventh century. Some have thought it was taken in memory of the founder, the charitable Lambert le Bègue. Others think that, even as the Mystics or Mutterers, the Lollards or Hummers, the Papelhards or Babblers, so the Beguines or Stammerers were thus nicknamed from their continual murmuring in prayer. This is plausible; but not so plausible as the suggestion of Dr. Mosheim and M. Auguste Jundt, who derive the word Beguine from the Flemish verb beggen, to beg. For we know that these pious women had been veritable beggars; and beggars should they again become.

With surprising swiftness the new order spread through the Netherlands and into France and Germany. Every town had its surplus of homeless and pious widows, and also its little quota of women who wished to spend their lives in doing good, but had no vocation for the cloister. The Beguinage, as it was called, became a home and refuge to either class. Before 1250 there were Beguines, or Begging Sisters, at Tirlemont, Valenciennes, Douai, Ghent, Louvain, and Antwerp in Flanders; at all the principal towns in France, especially at Cambray, where they numbered over a thousand; at Bâle and Berne in Switzerland; at Lübeck, Hamburg, Magdeburg, and many towns in Germany, with two thousand Beguines at Cologne and numerous beguinages in the pious town of Strasburg.

So the order spread, within the memory of a man. Lambert may have lived to see a beguinage in every great town within his ken; but we hear no more of him. The Beguines are no longer for Liege, but for all the world. Each city possessed its quiet congregation; and at any sick-bed you might meet a woman clad in a simple smock and a great veil-like mantle, who lived only to pray and to do deeds of mercy. They were very pious, these uncloistered sisters of the poor. Ignorant women who had known the utmost perils of life and death, their fervour was warmer, fonder, more illiterate than the devotion of nuns; they prayed ever as being lately saved from disgrace and ruin and starvation. Their quiet, unutterable piety became a proverb, almost a reproach; much as, within our memories, the unctuous piety of Methodists was held in England. When the child Elizabeth of Hungary fasted and saw visions in the Wartburg, the Princess Agnes, her worldly sister-in-law, could find no more cruel taunt than this: “Think you my brother will marry such a Beguine?” This is in 1213, only eight-and-thirty years since Lambert built the first asylum for the destitute widows of Liege.

III.

The success of the Beguines had made them an example; the idea of a guild of pious uncloistered workers in the world had seized the imagination of Europe. Before St. Francis and St. Dominic instituted the mendicant orders, there had silently grown up in every town of the Netherlands a spirit of fraternity, not imposed by any rule, but the natural impulse of a people. The weavers seated all day long alone at their rattling looms, the armourers beating out their thoughts in iron, the cross-legged tailors and busy cobblers thinking and stitching together—these men silent, pious, thoughtful, joined themselves in a fraternity modelled on that of the Beguines. They were called the Weaving Brothers. Bound by no vows and fettered by no rule, they still lived the worldly life and plied their trade for hire. Only in their leisure they met together and prayed and dreamed and thought. Unlettered men, with warm undisciplined fancies, they set themselves to solve the greatest mysteries of earth and heaven. Sometimes, in their sublime and dangerous audacity, they stumbled on a truth; more often they wandered far afield, led by the will-o’-the-wisp of their own unguided thoughts. In the long busy hours of weaving and stitching they found strange answers to the problems of human destiny, and, in their leisure, breathless and eager, discussed these theories as other men discussed their chance of better wage. Such were the founders of the great fraternity of Fratres Textores, or Beghards as in later years the people more generally called them. And their philosophy is so strangely abstract and remote that we could not explain it, did we not know that from time to time some secular priest or wealthy and pious laymen joined the humble fraternity. And the priest would bring, to their store of dim wonderings, the[the] Alexandrian theories of the pseudo-Dionysius, then, in all the monasteries of Christendom, deemed the very corner-stone of sacred philosophy. We can imagine how eagerly these simple folk would seize the hallowed fragments of Erigena and of the Areopagite, and how they would treasure them as holy secrets in the depth of their tender and mystical souls. We know that now and then a consecrated priest would join the unsanctioned but pious order of the Beghards; it is no great stretch of fancy to suppose that from time to time, some Crusader, fresh from the East, would bring them his memory of Eastern theories; that some scholar would add a line from Avicenna or Averroes. Through some channel, it is evident, the Beghards received the last feeble stream of Alexandrian theory. Their vague, idealistic pantheism is but an echo of Plotinus and his school. From the monasteries, from the Arabian commentators on Aristotle, or directly from the East, these fragments of neoplatonist philosophy must have reached them; and out of them there should be evolved, first of all, the great metaphysical heresies of the Middle Ages; and, later on, the habit of mind that should produce the German Reformation.

IV.

While the Beghards and the Beguines were slowly, imperceptibly nearing the great abyss of heresy, the creation of two new orders at Rome insidiously took from them the greater part of their prestige. Until the Franciscans and Dominicans obtained the sanction of the Pope, the beguinage had seemed the natural mean between the life of the cloister and the life of the world. But the new charitable orders had all the activity, the beneficence of the Beguines, and therewith the friendship and protection of Rome. For some time longer the Beguines flourished, still orthodox and reputable; but the order had received its death-blow on the day when Francis and Dominic obtained the Papal sanction for their Tertiary Orders of Penitence.

The tertiary orders of Dominic and Francis were a new departure from the exclusive theories of Roman monasticism. They were invented for men and women of holy life, married and still living in the world, who wished for some nearer association with the Church than belongs to the ordinary member of a congregation. They took their part in worldly joys and sorrows, triumphs and failures; but they prayed longer than other worldly folk, did more good works, looked more for heaven. The institution of these orders was a wide breach in the barrier which divides the cloister from the world, the sacred from the profane. They were, in fact, as the reader has perceived, merely an hierarchic version of those fraternities which the unconsecrated poor had made among themselves: Beguines and Beghards protected by the Church.

Thus the idea of the secular beguinage was transformed into a sacred thing. The example of the Beguines had been followed by the Church, who, in consecrating these new orders, made an immense reform in the old exclusive monastic ideal, a tremendous concession to the new democratic spirit inspiring all men. Hitherto the cloister had been a refuge and asylum from the noisy nations without. It had been as an ark, floating over the stormy waters, offering safety indeed to those inside it, yet not concerned with the clamorous multitude that drowned and struggled beyond it in the increasing flood. The aim of Francis and of Dominic was to quit this aloof and lofty shelter, to go and reprove the erring and rescue the ignorant, to be the friend and brother of sinners and publicans, of Magdalens and lepers, to revert, in fact, to the old democratic ideal of the Christian Church. They were to be poor among the poor, armed only with the armour of faith. They were to be in the world the heralds of God. The sisters of the orders were to be humble women, the brothers mendicant friars. At first they took no more from the world than the wandering Beguines took in later days—only water, bread, and a garment. But this strict rule of absolute poverty was soon removed, and the Dominicans, at all events, were never destitute.

Each order had its different mission. The Dominicans, the preaching brothers, should persuade the hard of heart, strengthen the failing, console the desolate, warn the erring, and exterminate the heretic. Yet, singularly enough, this most orthodox order, these watch-dogs of the Lord, were to become in Germany a centre of mystical heresies. The order of St. Francis, the Lesser Brothers, had a more tender and ecstatic ideal. They went begging through the world, tending the sick, loving the helpless, preaching to the birds and the fishes, full of a quaint compassionate unworldliness, a holy folly. There were few hearts so hard that, though unshaken by the storms of Dominic, they did not melt before the sweet Franciscan sanctity. And so the two orders traversed the world, twin forces and voices of pity. But the chivalrous and militant pity of Dominic, eager to avenge the outraged Christ continually crucified by infidels, too often took the form of wrath and burnings, while Francis loved the erring with a simple human pity. In return the world bestowed, and still bestows, upon him something of the wondering compassionate reverence which Eastern nations give to the Pure Fool, the man unsoiled by the wisdom of the world and still wrapped round with the simplicity of God. Between them, the two orders were to divide the Christian world. Sanctioned in the same year and under the same hospitable rule of Augustine, they went out triumphantly upon their different missions. Inspired, it is most probable, by the example of the Beguines, they would soon absorb the secular order into their mighty forces. And the real decline of Beguinism begins, not in 1250, when first the secular fraternities became conspicuous for heresy, but on that day of the year 1216 when the learned Dominic and the visionary Francis met and embraced each other in the streets of Rome.

V.

At first the external position of the Beguines and the Beghards appeared in no danger and no disadvantage. Their fraternity had always been a secular fraternity; their condition of pious laymen was one which offered sanctity with independence. The beguinages still thrived and multiplied. In the Low Countries especially, and in Cambray, Strasburg, and Cologne,—places where mysticism has ever been dear, and ecclesiastical authority never a welcome yoke—Beguinism grew apace. But there is no doubt that one great cause which for thirty years averted the ruin of the secular fraternities was the presence in their midst of one of the most remarkable women of her century; a woman who, to the Beguines, was all that St. Elizabeth was to the Franciscans, or that Catherine of Siena should become to the order of St. Dominic. This gifted and singular creature was the prophetess Mechtild of Magdeburg.

We do not know the name of the castle where, in the year 1212, Mechtild of Magdeburg was born. It cannot have been very far from the city which was to be her refuge, and whose name she bears. The title of her father is also lost; but it is certain she came of noble and courtly stock. Her family were probably religious people, for we know that her brother Baldwin became one of the Dominicans of Halle.

Mechtild was, as she herself recalls, the dearest of her parents’ children; and these courtly and pious Thuringian nobles seem to have been as proud as they were fond of their little daughter. She received a liberal education. Her book on the flowing light of Godhead is written with an energy, sweetness, and variety of style strongly in contrast with the Gertrudenbuch and the Mechtildenbuch of Helfta. The music of her verse proves her familiar with the lyrics of the Minnesingers. They may no doubt have visited her father’s castle. But the little Mechtild did not dream of poetry and of knights-at-arms. It was later that she would deplore the poor vain minstrels[minstrels] who in hell weep more tears than there are waters in the sea.[^[2]] Her thoughts in childhood were all for the saints in heaven. When she was twelve years old, the little girl was (as she records it) visited by the Holy Spirit; and from that moment she desired to quit the world.

It was a moment of intense spiritual exaltation, this year 1224. Close at hand in the Wartburg the seventeen-year-old Landgravine Elizabeth was exciting the wonder of her people by her pieties and sweet austerities. The bread miraculously turned into heavenly roses, the leper whom she tended transformed into the shining Christ, the stories of her visions and her scourgings would certainly be familiar to the little Mechtild. The Emperor Frederic II. was already collecting his nobles for his ill-starred and heretic crusade. On Monte Laverna, in this very year, St. Francis received the stigmata. Blanche of Castile and the child St. Louis were ruling Paris as King Arthur might have ruled his court at Camelot, by the authority of love and gentleness. At the same time the ghastly prevalence of leprosy and pestilence, of war and hideous famine, made the world as dreadful as heaven was desirable. Those who recall the condition of Eisenach, as revealed by the life of St. Elizabeth, may imagine the sights of human suffering which little Mechtild must have encountered every day. And close by, in the vast woods of Prussia, dwelt heathen folk who knew of nothing better than this cruel world. In that very year some of the crusader knights had set out to conquer that pagan kingdom. Thus with on one hand holy Thuringia and with heathen Prussia on the other, with war, famine, and pestilence frequent petitioners at her gates, it is not surprising that the little Mechtild shared the spiritual fervours of her time, and longed to give herself to Heaven.

But she did not, like Gertrude and Mechtild of Hackeborn, enter a convent in her infancy. Most likely she yielded to the entreaties of her family, “of whom she was ever the dearest.” Year after year passed on, and Mechtild still dwelt in her father’s castle. Yet, after that one childish moment of ecstacy, the sweetness and honour of the world were to her as vain and perishable things. And still she was not visited again with trance or vision. She was no dreamer, this eager Mechtild, but a vigorous and healthy girl, in the flower of her beautiful and lusty youth, alert, passionate, with a mind awake to all the questions and interest of the world around her. Such a nature is not by instinct a mystical nature; but the strange contagion of the time had touched her, and worked slowly through her innermost being. Stronger and stronger grew the strenuous unworldly prompting: “without sin, to be disgraced before the world.”

For eleven years the desire waxed and strengthened; for eleven years did Mechtild combat this desire. Daily it grew more impelling, more subduing. At last, in the year 1235, the year of the canonization of Elizabeth, when Mechtild was twenty-three years old, she secretly left her father’s house, and fled to Magdeburg. She left all behind her—brothers and sisters, father and mother, “of whom she was the dearest,” and the courtly honourable life, and the quiet happiness of love and safety. Frau Minne, ihr habt mir benommen weltlich Ehre und allen weltlichen Reichthum! Everything indeed she left, to follow the goading impulse of Sacred Love.

When she reached the strange city, when she had left far behind her the distant home where even now her kinsmen would wonder, and miss her, and make a search, when the night fell on her in Magdeburg, Mechtild desired a shelter. Weary with her flight, she resolved to ask some nunnery to lend her its asylum. Within those holy walls she could more truly yield herself to God.

She knocked at a convent door, and begged for shelter, saying she desired to become a nun. But the quiet sisters distrusted this beautiful, travel-stained young woman of three-and-twenty, without means, or friends, or reference, alone at night in the turbulent city streets—this girl who, by her own confession, had fled her father’s house. Soon those doors were closed against her. There were, however, many convents in a great archiepiscopal city such as Magdeburg. To convent after convent went the despairing girl, finding at each, no doubt, rest for the limbs and food for the body, but in none of all of them a home. For no religious house would admit this unfriended and suspicious creature into its pure community. When the last doors had closed upon her, Mechtild stood in the street, alone in Magdeburg. It must have come upon her then, I think, that at last her great desire was granted—Without sin, she was disgraced before the world.

When Mechtild left her parents’ castle, she had chosen Magdeburg to be her hiding-place, because in that town there lived a friend of her family. She had thought to stay her heart upon the thought of this unvisited friend, who might be her last resource in case of extremity. But now the need was felt, Mechtild did not seek him. He would, she knew, endeavour to persuade her from the path that she had chosen, and Mechtild was in need of all her courage.

So, unfriended, alone, she stood in the streets of Magdeburg. Then she bethought her of another shelter, humble indeed, but safe. And she had left home only to be humbled. What humiliation would there have been in entering, like the dear St. Elizabeth, the holy order of St. Francis? Or what abasement had she, like her brother, embraced the rule of Dominic, “dearest to me,” she avers, “of all the saints”? Here there was no spiritual sacrifice. And what sacrifice of life, of social habit, of esteem could she have made had she entered one of the great Cistercian or Benedictine convents, where the nobles of Saxony and Thuringia were proud to send their daughters? Mechtild was glad that they had rejected her; it seemed to her that at last, pure of pride, free of weak desire, she saw her own will made plain and the directing will of God.

She moved now; she knew what to do and where to go; she was no longer unguided and alone. She went to the beguinage, the home of mendicant widows, the almshouse of the holy poor who gave themselves to God. At that door, which debarred no one from the outer world, Mechtild knocked. A poor woman opened to her, clad in a plain smock and a great mantle covering head and shoulders. Such another gown and cloak was lying by, ready for the welcome Mechtild. She entered the house.

That night Mechtild stood in her little cell. It was much like any convent cell; but it was without a convent’s restrictions or its privileges. Mechtild might quit those walls this year, next year, any year. She might marry and have children. She had, after all, offered up no sacrifice of her own body; she was not dead to the world, but was to live and labour in it more nearly now than in her father’s castle. No great barrier should stand henceforth between her soul and sin. The battle was not over; it was but just begun.

Far easier had been the greater sacrifice, done once and done for ever! Far more peaceful the quiet nunnery, hallowed to rapture and seclusion! Mechtild was now the servant only, and not the bride of Christ. She was a Beguine, not a nun. The accomplished daughter of nobles, she was the companion of the destitute and lowly. It was better thus, better to be lowly and despised, even as Christ was despised. All these thoughts of dismay, rapture, weariness, and exaltation, rushed and clashed through the tired breast of Mechtild. Then, for a second time, the trance crept over her, and she sank unconscious into the ever-present arms of God.

Then, in a vision, Mechtild saw how henceforward her life should be doubly glorious and doubly beset with peril. For she beheld the angel and the devil, who to this moment had been permitted to guide her and assail her, each miraculously changed into twain. Now at her right there stood a cherub, with gifts and holy wisdom on his azure wings, and a seraph bearing her a heart of love. But on the left two devils watched her—two devils who, in all times, have lain in wait for the mystic and the solitary visionary. And the name of the one was Vain-Glory, and that of the other Vain-Desire.

VI.

From the night of that vision begins the career of Mechtild and the history of her visions and her prophecies. At first, indeed, occupied in conquering her strong and lusty youth, the visions of Mechtild of Magdeburg are little different from those of any convent saint. Angels and devils, the beautiful manhood of our Lord, fragments from the Song of Solomon, the rapture of the Spiritual Nuptials—such are the inevitable themes. But this woman, we feel, is no mere Gertrude or Mechtild of Hackeborn. The whole world interests her, and the destinies of the world. In reading the book in which she wrote her visions, the book of the flowing light of Godhead, we soon pass over this initial stage to a second and wider phase.

“Ich habe gesehen ein Stat;

Ihr Name ist die ewige Hass.”

These pregnant words begin Mechtild’s “Vision of Hell.” The plan of this great vision, which beholds, built in succeeding and widening terraces, the habitations of sinners, with fire and darkness, stench and cold, and pain in the bottommost pit, no less than the scheme of the poem, which lashes many a prevalent sin of the Church, both alike recall a far greater poet yet unborn, one who should also explore the depths of hell and the heights of heaven, one who should accept as his guide towards Paradise a certain mysterious Matilda,

“Cantando come donna innamorata,”

in whom the learned Herr Preger has recognized our earnest minstrel of heaven, the loving and singing Mechtild of Magdeburg.

The form of Mechtild’s visions did not make her popular among the churchmen of her city. The people caught up the lilting, dancing measures of her songs. The pious sang her visions. And girls, to whom a nun had ever seemed a cold and sacred being, could understand the happy verses of the fearless love of God, in which Mechtild claims for herself an impulse as natural, as irresistible, as any maiden’s love of her betrothed:—

“Das ist eine kindische Liebe,

Dass man Kinder saüge und wiege;

Ich bin eine vollgewachsene Braut,

Ich will gehen nach meinem Traut.

“Ich stürbe gerne von Minnen

Seine Augen in meine Augen,

Sein Herz in mein Herze,

Sein Seele in meine Seele

Umfangen und umschlossen.

“Der Fisch mag in dem Wasser nicht ertrinken,

Der Vogel in den Lüften nicht versinken,

Das Gold mag in dem Feuer nicht verderben;

Wie möchte ich denn meiner Natur widerstehn?”

In the convents of Helfta and Quedlinburg these songs spread and furthered the great renown of Mechtild. Heinrich von Halle, the famous Dominican, went to see her, and became her friend. But the secular priests did not love her, this Beguine reformer, this new unsanctioned Abbess Hildegard, who saw so clearly and bewailed so explicitly the many corruptions which had crept upon the Church even in that age of faith, even in the century of St. Francis and St. Dominic, of King Louis and Elizabeth of Hungary. Some of these secular priests tried to burn her book; thereupon Mechtild saw a vision and heard the voice of God crying aloud: “Lieb’ meine, betrübe dich nicht zu sehr, die Wahrheit mag niemand verbrennen.”

Profound and touching phrase, motto of all martyrs and of every cause: No one can burn the Truth! Had the world but learned by heart this one poignant sentence, uttered in the very age which began the persecution of heretics, how many wars, deaths, angers, cruelties, centuries of remorse and hatred had not the world been spared! All honour to this woman, who, six centuries ago, perceived how vain it is to hunt, slay, burn, exterminate an idea. This sentence should be immortal.

Mechtild continued to speak what seemed to her the most necessary truth. “Pope and priests,” she cries, “are going the road to hell. Unless they quit their sensuality, their spiritual negligence, their temporal greed, fearful disasters will overwhelm them.” “In this book,” she says, “I write with my heart’s blood.” She is no unfilial antagonist threatening the power of Rome, but a daughter striving to lead her parent back into the holy way. She has a vision, and sees perverted Christendom lying, “like an impure virgin,” far from the throne of God. She takes it in the arms of her soul, and strives to lift it nearer. “Leave hold!” cries the tremendous voice of God; “she is too great a weight for thee.” And Mechtild looks up and smiles. “Eia, my Lord!” she cries; “I will carry her to Thy feet with Thine own arms that Thou didst outspread upon the cross for her!”

Such is the aim of Mechtild: to bring the over-powerful and worldly Roman hierarchy back to the primitive and democratic ideal of Christianity. She has the courage of her intention, and shrinks not from rebuking error, however high its place. She, the Beguine, the sister of the poor, wrote to the Dean of Magdeburg censuring the notoriously idle and voluptuous lives of his clergy. “Let him sleep upon straw, and his canons take and eat it for their fodder!” Perhaps it is not wonderful the clergy of Magdeburg did not love the prophetess.

Also she wrote to the Pope, to Clement IV., whose tolerance of the murder of Conradine had lost him many loyal German hearts, whose lax and irreligious court was Gomorrah in the sight of Mechtild. And these priests and prelates, this all-powerful Pope, if they do not reform and obey, yet listen they humbly to the words of this unsanctioned nun, this secular sister of Magdeburg.

Never again have the Beguines attained so fine, so pure an eminence. They are indeed still poor, still lowly, still unrecognized, still Beguines. But these negations are become their glory and their distinction. Which life is nearer the ideal life of Christendom, the life of a great prelate or the life of the Beguine? The priests hear and listen, for the moment abashed because of their splendour and their power. The Beguines are poor, unlettered, unprotected; but they are nearer the simplicity of God, that reine heilige Einfalt which the Beguine Mechtild well knows how to praise.

So for thirty years Mechtild preached against error and prophesied punishment, sang of the love of God, and saw visions of a hell where wicked ecclesiastics burn for persecuting the innocent. For thirty years she lived, in her beguinage, the strenuous, earnest, indignant life of the reforming seer, the life of Dante, the life of Savonarola. And then the vigorous frame wore out. In her fifty-third year even Mechtild saw that an end must be put to this unrelaxed endeavour. Fain would she have gone, like Jutta von Schönhausen, into the wild woods to preach to the heathen Prussians. But this could not be; the body was too weak. She retired to the Cistercian cloister of Helfta, the home of the great Abbess Gertrude, and of her sister, the younger Mechtild. But even there she did not rest. “What shall I do in a cloister—I?” she demanded in agonized prayers. “Teach and enlighten,” answered a heavenly voice. And so for twelve years longer Mechtild lives, and teaches the cloister of the great world beyond its walls, and finishes her book on the flowing light of Godhead, till, honoured and loved by all, she ends her eventful life in the year 1277.

VII.

Reine, Heilige Einfalt; such is the phrase in which Mechtild praised her God. Pure, holy simplicity; it is the praise of the Beguines and the Mystics, the beginning of pantheism. But Mechtild is no pantheist; she strenuously believes in the personality of the soul, the reality of Christ, the existence of the world, and in heaven and in hell. She is an orthodox and Catholic Christian; yet she is stirred by the spirit of her time.

“God,” she says, “is pure simplicity; out of the eternal spring of Deity I flowed, and all things flow, and thence shall all return.” These earnest phrases of mystical pantheism escape her lips, though they do not touch her heart. She does not consider all that they imply; for if all things, having arisen in the Deity, flow back to their source when life is over, how can Evil have a real existence, how can sinners be punished for ever in the city of Eternal Hate? If God be the one thing real, there is no evil and there is no hell. If all souls released from existence return to that pure and holy simplicity, there is no personal immortality either for bliss or for bale. Mechtild did not perceive the bearings and the consequences of her phrase; but the Beguines pushed the meaning to its term. The pantheism of Alexandria, the pantheism of the suppressed Almarician heresy, stirred and quickened in the thoughts of pious and schismatic Beguinism. And pantheism, with its two extremes of austerity and sensualism, increased and deepened in the sect.

Mystical pantheism, which asserts that God is all and matter nothing; the spirit all, the body but a transitory veil; thought and mind eternal, sense and sensuous pleasure of no account for evil or for good; this doctrine is capable of two interpretations. It may be the religion of Plotinus and pure souls. It may absolutely ignore the body; it may mean the life of the mind and the soul carried always to the highest possible pitch. Or it may be, and too often is, the excuse of the basest sensualism. There is a page of psychology in the changed meaning of the word Libertine. Since, neither for sin nor for sanctity, the body can affect the soul, since sensuous pleasures are quite independent of the spiritual existence, the lower pantheism may excuse debauch as a permissible relaxation not affecting the spirit. And this is what it generally does come to mean among communities of undisciplined and ill-educated enthusiasts.

This is gradually what it came to mean among the Beghards and the Beguines, or at least among a large proportion of them. Some, indeed, praying to the Pure and Holy Simplicity, endeavoured to live only in the pureness of their souls, and thus to become one with that inspiring spirit. Such were the Beguines of Strasburg. And a section of the secular communities, dreading these continual inroads of heresy, entrenched themselves in Catholic orthodoxy, and enlisted in the third orders of Dominic and Francis. But the great remainder was absorbed by a vague mystical pantheism, which, placing the soul too high to be affected by the matters of the flesh, made this opinion an excuse for a complete independence of the moral law.

Towards the close of the life of Mechtild the prestige of Beguinism had seriously declined. Innocent IV. and Urban IV. had taken the secular order under their peculiar protection, but in 1274, Pope Gregory X. renewed against it the sentence of the Lateran Council and declared the Beguines unrecognized by Rome. Following this official condemnation, the blame of lesser men came thick and fast; and by the end of the thirteenth century the secular fraternities were popular only among the poor, only among the laymen and the people. They were discredited and heretic among the clergy.

For thirty years before the sentence of Gregory complaints of the Beguines and the Beghards had been sent to Rome from the prelates of Germany and Flanders. The two demons foreseen by Mechtild, the demon of vainglory and the demon of sensual sin, had entered in among these quiet homes of prayer. Already in 1244 there were scandals among the younger sisters, and the Archbishop of Mayence decreed that the beguinages of his diocese should receive no women under forty years of age. Already in 1250 Albertus Magnus at Cologne had met with heretic Beghards, men whose vague pantheism was to grow and spread among the order, until all distinction should be lost between the Beghards and the heretic Brothers of the Free Spirit. Already they had returned to their old habits, wandering through the streets, ragged as an Eastern fakir, praying aloud and begging of the passers-by: “Bread, for the sake of God!” Too much ignorance with too much liberty had gone far to destroy and pervert the real uses of the order. The great moment of Beguinism, its time of independent poverty and secular piety, the time of Mechtild of Magdeburg, was past and gone. The third stage of vagabondage and heresy had begun.

That period, we must remember, was one which, in the Church itself, was a period of corruption and of schism. There is no charge brought against the secular order, which might not equally be brought against the regular monks and nuns. The long wave of pantheism which preceded the Reformation engulfed the ignorant Beguines in a hundred perversions of an idea ill explained, misunderstood; but that same wave overwhelmed Master Eckhart and the Dominican Mystics. Only the Roman Church, jealous of the unrecognized order, was swift to hear the low voice of the Beguines murmuring, “God is all that exists.”

This one phrase caught, repeated, whispered, half understood, misunderstood, often not understood at all, spread with the swiftness and authority of gospel among the Beghards and the Beguines of Europe. Soon in Italy, the vagrant sect of Apostolici, the followers of Segarelli, and the Franciscan Fraticelli in France, and the Beghards and Beguines of Northern Europe, all were murmuring together that one phrase, that key-word of pantheism, “Deus est formaliter omne.”

It is not easy to prevent the growth of an idea among a community so widely spread, so constantly changing. Segarelli was burned at Parma all in vain. His doctrines had percolated everywhere. Inspired by the example of the mendicant orders, many of the Beghards and Beguines had returned to the vagabond life. Pious vagrants all in rags, staffless, scripless, they wandered through the country from beguinage to beguinage, begging for their food along the way. It was a change indeed from the early habits of the order, so busy, so hard at work, so pious, so responsible. But in the hearts of the lowest classes the secular fraternities were never so dear, never so much revered as now. In 1295 the Council of Mayence forbad them to wander through the streets, exciting public pity and crying, “Brod durch Got!” and Guillaume de St. Amour lamented that the people were blinded by the rags, the hunger, the false piety of these vagrants. This, of course, is the view of churchmen who did not entertain such strict opinions with regard to the merit of Franciscan mendicants. Indeed, much of the ill-favour with which the Church regarded the wandering Beghards and Beguines of these later days may be set down to a jealousy lest the piety of these irregular brothers should defraud the begging orders of their due. From one cause or another the thunders of the Church began to fall heavy and frequent upon the secular fraternities.

In 1310 the Council of Treves disposed of the pretensions of the Beghards in what appeared a sufficiently decisive manner. The Beghards were called an imaginary congregation, idle fugitives from honest labour, false interpreters of Scripture, mendicant vagabonds unsanctioned by the Church.

In 1311, at the Council of Vienna, Clement V. decreed the total suppression of Beguinism. But the sentence was severe. Too many innocent must suffer with the guilty. In the same year the Pope revoked his sentence, and allowed the orthodox and irreproachable among the Beguines to live “according to the inspiration of the Lord.”

But from this time Beguinism as an institution was at an end. The “orthodox and irreproachable” were Beghards and Beguines who had joined the Tertiary Order of Francis or of Dominic. The secular order was no longer secular; the aim of the Beguines was falsified and changed.

VIII.

In the year 1328 nearly fifty Libertines or Brothers of the Free Spirit were publicly burned at Cologne.

The persecution of the wandering Beguines and Beghards had thoroughly begun. In the history of the time, in the chronicles of any town along the Rhine or in the Low Countries, we may meet the dolorous little entry: On such a day so many Beghards were burned or imprisoned in perpetual In pace. A special German Inquisition was instituted against them.

It is the old cruel war of intolerance and heresy, the vain and shameful struggle with which six centuries are full. But there was here a more than usual excuse for the excessive severity of Rome. Europe was fast being ruined by these mendicant wanderers. Begging friars of St. Francis, Carmelites, Dominicans, numerous new orders which flourished for a while, and died, and are forgotten, all these flooded the country with pious vagrants for whom the impoverished laymen must provide. And in addition to all these orthodox idlers, there was now a countless horde of wandering Beghards, no less ignorant, no less incapable of warfare or of labour, and, in addition, pestilent heretics. Such was the view of the Church.

Fifty years before, Gregory X. had tried to reduce “the unbridled throng of mendicants, who are a heavy burden alike on Church and people;” but his efforts had been in vain. The poor of every nation and of every time are quick to ascribe piety to those who, ragged and homeless, assert that the life to come shall repay them for their sufferings here. Half starved, down-trodden, little better than slaves, the peasants of Germany would share their squalid meal thankfully with the wandering friar. It was little less than sacrilege to refuse a portion to the holy man. This was the natural attitude of the people. They gave, and did not complain.

They gave, and the friars took, and the Beghards took, and still the cry was “Give.” The Fratricelli, Apostolici, Beghards, Beguines, Brothers of the Free Spirit, overran the whole of Europe. These all must be fed no less than the orthodox fraternities. And year by year the number of the mendicants increased. The careless wandering life without responsibility or consequence, the absence of ties or of toil, the prestige in idleness, attracted the vagabond and lazy. And many of the pious really believed it the noblest human life. Since the idea of Divinity was simplicity, mere simplicity, then the more the saint was simplified and the less heed he took for apparel or for food the nearer he was to heaven. These men and women, strange descendants of the spinning sisters and the Fratres Textores, were like the lilies of the field inasmuch as they toiled not, neither did they spin. They thus fulfilled the popular ideal of piety. Year by year labour and forethought grew more discredited, as it was discovered that, if you did not feed yourself, a more worldly person would always feed you; until in 1317 we read in the sentences collected by Johann von Ochsenstein that no exterior motive, not even the desire of the kingdom of heaven, should tempt a good man towards activity.

It was in vain for even the Pope to preach, for Guillaume de St. Amour to attack all mendicants alike, for councils and bishops to thunder against the indolence, the mendicancy, the lax morals and loose opinions of these men. The mendicants grew more and more. The nations groaned under the holy burden. Then, about 1310, unable to contain her displeasure any longer, the Church bursts forth into interdicts and persecution. Fifty Beghards are burned at Cologne. At Magdeburg some Beguines are cast into prison. At Strasburg, at Constance, at Mayence, the Beguines and Beghards are punished unless converted within three days. It is war to the knife against the wandering heretics.

IX.

Under the pressure of a displeasure so severe, the greater number of the Beghards and Beguines accepted the rule of the tertiary orders. The mother became submissive to her children. The larger party of the fraternity, including all the Flemish beguinages, accepted the Franciscan rule; but the Beghards and Beguines of Strasburg, the most suspected of any, joined the Tertiary Order of Dominic. Thus the heresy of Beguinism appeared for a while overcome.

But at the same time a strange mystical pantheistic tendency became noticeable in many sermons and lessons of the Church herself. All this multitude of heretic Beguines, suddenly made orthodox within three days, all this vast accession of vague Almarician piety was not without an influence on the conquering faith. Among the Dominicans of Strasburg the mystical bent grew more decided year by year. These much-admired doctors and magisters were lights of the Church, men of influence and learning; but the mysticism which was orthodox in them was really identical with the neoplatonist theories of the Beghards. And, indeed, these men,—Eckhart, Tauler, Rulmann Merswin—went further in the way of pantheism than the heretic brotherhood had gone before.

It is impossible to exterminate an idea. It must live its course, grow, flourish, and die. Be it wise or foolish, orthodox or heterodox, let it but have some new aspect of truth in it; let it but be fresh, profound, and striking; let it be truly and verily an idea: it will live its life before it dies its natural death.

Thus the idea of the Beguines, arbitrarily suppressed, yet flourished only the more. Like a brier budded on a rose tree, it brought out its wild and fragile blossoms among the ordered beauties of the ecclesiastical garden. In the great Dominican mystics of Strasburg the central thought of heretic Beguinism (“Deus est omnia”) flourished more completely than before.

God is all: the world is nothing. This is what the mystics of Strasburg and the mystics of the Netherlands now began to preach to the world.

X.

From the year 1312 until 1320 Master Eckhart, the great Dominican preacher, was living in Strasburg. His deep and original mind, which so vastly was to influence the speculation of his time, was now itself brought under the influence of Beguinism. From 1312 to 1317 he preached and visited in the Dominican beguinages of Strasburg. Always a mystic and a neoplatonist, before that date he was not suspected of heresy[heresy]. The theories of the Dominican Beguines agreed perfectly with the convictions of this singular being, who preached in accents of strenuous sincerity the doctrine of the unreality of matter.

Among the Beguines of his diocese was one whom Eckhart adopted to be his spiritual daughter. But the relation of the Beguine Sister Katrei to the great Vicar-general of the Dominican order was scarcely that attitude of submission which we expect from a penitent to her confessor. She leads him on to new audacities of faith, suggests new penances, refuses all restraint. She shows him how an earnest nature can reduce to practice his special tenet that the world is nothing, that God alone exists.

Katrei was the daughter of worthy Strasburg townspeople. Not necessity, but an enthusiasm for self-humiliation drove her to the beguinage. Ever in doubt of her own salvation, she multiplied her fasts and penances till even her director beseeched her to take some pity on her starved and shattered body. But Katrei would not be persuaded; not yet, she declared, was the old Adam slain in her; not yet was she “dead all through.” As Mechtild of Magdeburg is the great active type of the order, so Katrei represents the passive Beguinism. She had no reforming zeal; she belonged to the later school, to those who said: “Not even the desire of the kingdom of heaven must tempt a good man towards activity.”

To free herself from the world and the claims of the world, to leave behind the flesh and all the needs and desires of the flesh, this was the overmastering preoccupation of Swester Katrei. She left the sheltering beguinage, the faces too familiar to be easily forgotten, the neighbourhood of father and of mother, and set out alone upon the wandering Beguine’s life. With her she took neither staff nor scrip. “All that I ask of the world,” she said, “is a spring, a crust, and a garment” (brunnen, brod, und ein rock). So for many months she went, absorbed in her own soul, forgetting men and women, earthly pleasure, earthly love, and earthly duty, and at last returned to Strasburg to be known by no one there.

She was not yet satisfied. Her ideal was not yet reached. “Not yet,” she persisted, “am I dead all through.” “Nay,” answered the confessor (behind whose cowl we see the face of Eckhart), “not so long as thou rememberest who was thy father and who thy mother; not so long as thou shalt care if thy priest refused to confess thee or absolve thee; not so long as it shall disturb thee if thou mayest not taste the body of God; not so long as thou shalt grieve when none will shelter thee, and all despise thee; not until then, my sister, canst thou know the real death unto self.” Then again, Katrei retired into the wilderness, and for a long time she wandered to and fro across the face of the earth. When she returned she was strangely changed; even her confessor did not know her. At last, her cataleptic trances growing daily longer and more profound, she being permanently raised into a strange hysteric insensibility to pain or hunger, she lay the whole day long without food or drink or movement in a corner of the great cathedral. Now she was dead to outer things. “Now,” she said, “I am God.” Her father and her mother came and cried to her, half abashed at her holiness, half agonized at her condition. But Katrei did not know them now. She no longer recognized what she looked upon; the world and all within it was a blank to her.

At last, one day, the trance deepened; she ceased to breathe. Some people of the church, thinking her dead, took her away to bury her. But when they returned to the church with Katrei on the bier, her confessor, approaching, perceived she was not really dead. “Art thou satisfied?” he demanded; and she answered, “I am satisfied at last.” She would have let them bury her.

Quietism can go no further than this. When this singular woman died, between 1312 and 1320, though the Church already began to censure the mystical errors of Beguinism, yet her piety was deemed so great that Meister Eckhart wrote a memoir of her life as an example and an exhortation to the pious. She is the saint of the later Beguinism, even as the vigorous Mechtild of Magdeburg is the patron of the older style.

XI.

But sister Katrei had too many followers, and gradually the sense of the religious world revolted from this numb and dead ideal. Already, in the writings of Suso (1335), of Ruysbrock, and Rulmann Merswin, men whose idealist mysticism was little different from the Beguine heresy, the quietism of these “false freemen” is utterly condemned. Suso, in his Book of Truth, recounts how he met on a journey one of these wandering Beghards, who, to all his questions, responded much as Parsifal responds to Gurnemanz. Whence he came and whither going, the wanderer does not know. He is called the Nameless Savage. He is Nothing abysmed in the Divine Nothingness. Without will or desire he obeys his natural instincts, since any conflict with them would destroy the quiet of his soul. Such is the latest type of the secular brotherhood; but this, unlike Sister Katrei, meets no approval from the marvelling Church.

Indeed, the Beghards and the Beguines, with their lax morals, their mendicant insolence, had become an insupportable burden. So, in despair, in 1328 the Church, as we have said, delivered fifty of them to the secular arm, and these were burned, as an example, in Cologne. The persecution was now steadfast and continuous; but still in secret places, and by strange underground channels, the pantheist[pantheist] idea spread on unseen—pantheism which now was no longer vague and veiled. “We do not believe in God, and we do not love Him, and we do not adore Him, and we do not hope in Him, for this would be to avow that He is other than ourselves.” Thus speak these heretics of the fourteenth century. So far have they pushed the phrase, God is all that exists.

From this time the cohesive force of Beguinism rapidly diminishes. In 1365 Pope Urban V. still speaks of the “children of Belial, Beghards and Beguines,” but their name slips gradually out of the chronicles of edicts and of councils. Or it is applied to any new sect of heretics. In 1373 we hear of “the Beghards or Turlupins,” and in the next century Beghard is frequently synonymous with Lollard. The great heresy of the Free Spirit was divided into a hundred unimportant divisions. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the[the] Beghards and Beguines were either orthodox communities of some tertiary order, or scattered hermits, living in woods and forests, and stealthily keeping red the few embers left of pantheistic heresy. It seemed as if the movement were really stamped out. But the phrase of Mechtild was not so easily confuted. No man can burn an idea.

We hear no more, it is true, of the Beguines or of the Weaving Brothers; but in the sixteenth century, when at Wittenberg and at Strasburg, at Basle and at Meaux, the great idea of the Reformation simultaneously awoke, in that period of spiritual ferment, the pantheism of the secular fraternities flamed out again, and more fiercely than before. The libertines, the anabaptists, and familists of the sixteenth century preserved in a coarser form the persecuted tradition of the Beghards and the Beguines.

[1]. The principal sources for this and the two following articles are as follows:—Mosheim, “Institutiones Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ;” Dr. Schmidt’s “Strasburger Beginen-häuser im[im] Mittelalter” and other pages by this master of mediæval religious thought; Dr. Preger’s “Geschichte[Geschichte] der deutschen Mystik im Mittelalter;” the volume on “Le Panthéisme populaire au Moyen Age” of M. Auguste Jundt; Stockl’s “Geschichte der Philosophie: Meister Eckhardt;” the writings on the School of Alexandria of M. Vacherot and M. Barthélemy Saint Hilaire; Mr. Vaughan’s “Half-Hours with the Mystics;” and last, not least, the sermons of Eckhardt, the poems of Mechtild of Magdeburg, and the meditations and lives of Saint Gertrude and Saint Mechtild of Helfta.

[2]. “Der viel arme Spielmann der mit hohem Mŭthe sündliche Eitelkeit machen kann, der weint in der Hölle mehr Thränen denn alles Wassers ist in dem Meer.” I like to give the reader a line of Mechtild’s book—from what I have read of it, that is to say, in the pages of Herr Preger and elsewhere—to show him the musical lilt of her style, the emotional charm (foreshadowing Heinrich Suso), and a certain easy lightness of heart I remember in no other mystical book, except in the exquisite Fioretti di San Francesco.

The Convent of Helfta.

The great ideals of the world save themselves by strange disguises. Though the advance of progress threaten their existence, none the less they perpetuate themselves in unsuspected shelter. If to-day we see religion mask itself as devotion to humanity, it is but the reversal of the great masquerade of the Middle Ages, when whatever impulse of good-will to man was destined to survive assumed for safety’s sake the garb of the Church. Benevolence, science, logic, philosophy, and all the arts put on the hood and cowl. And the time came when love also entered religion. Indeed, the convent was the one safe place of refuge in a struggling, dark, chaotic world—a world for which centuries of careful nurture had ill-fitted the sentiment of love. The Middle Ages had existed, one might say, for its development. During the century succeeding the invention of the Immaculate Conception (1134), the cultus of the Virgin became dominant in the Church, and, pari passu, the position of women grew nobler in the world—was, indeed, elevated and spiritualized to a dangerous artificial beauty. Then a thousand devices were discovered to hide from the yet imperfect man and woman the brutality of the one and the meanness of the other. The Courts of Love, where no husband might be the lover of his wife, the gross and strained devotion of the minnesingers, the worship of Mary and the saints, were expedients unreal or ugly in themselves, but they imposed on mere brutish passion a beautiful sentiment of reverence and service. For they showed the woman beloved as a creature aloof and apart, separated from the disenchantment of possession by the distance of heaven or the barriers of earth.

Thus through the Middle Ages love grew and flourished; a plant delicate yet and scarcely acclimatised, but watered and tendered and sheltered. Without this care it could not grow, being still young and not well-rooted. Then in the thirteenth century a terrible convulsion disturbed the world, and the fate of all tender, exquisite things hung for a while in awful balance. For in that eventful century, which rounds the old world and begins the new, the long-gathering jealousy of pope and emperor burst into a fearful storm. The tempest of over twenty years which destroyed the empire of the house of Hohenstaufen left Rome, though victorious, none the less a prey to her own champion, Charles of Anjou. For three years he would not suffer the election of a pope, holding the keys of Peter in his unrelaxing clutches; and even when the papal see was nominally filled, the Angevine adventurer guided its counsels and prompted its decrees. One shipwreck engulfed both papacy and empire, nor could any foresee that from those wrecks far nobler vessels should be built. The hierarchic and feudal order of things had fallen, and the spirit of law and federation was yet unknown. All over Europe spread darkness and confusion: Rome was paralysed, France crazed with superstition and communistic panic, Italy a mere disorganised prey for the next comer; and Germany, most piteous of all, with the convert’s earnestness and the loyalty of a serf, not yet fit for the sudden withdrawal of the hierarchy and the feudalism to which she clung for support, Germany reeled heavily. It seemed that the end of the world was at hand; and truly, in this terrible interregnum, the whole fabric of the Middle Ages began to crack and gape in ominous ruin.

Now that the Courts of Love were wasted, his tournaments battle-fields, his minstrels shouting battle-cries, what had become of Love? Where should his ladies, sung so long and honoured, look for their knights? They are gone to fight for God and the king; they are gone far away, but no longer to the Holy Sepulchre; they are gone to ravage and ruin distant cities, or to lay low the power of Rome. Many never return; some after years—ten, fifteen, twenty years—come home again, tanned and grey—swearing troopers, whose talk is all of battle, whose camp jests and lewd stories fall like filth into the pure fountain of a woman’s soul. What knight is this for a delicate lady to love! She must change the very nature of her love if this shall satisfy her heart. The frail ideal, nourished so long with care and patience, must die, so it seems. But, as in ancient legends, where the lustful lover pursues a pure nymph, gaining hold upon her, stretching out his hands for the prize, to find them empty, to find her out of reach, safe in the inviolable greenness of the laurel, even so the tender spirit of love, with one violent effort, set itself beyond the lusts of the imbruted world, sheltered, transformed into the mystical love of God.

A natural impulse was given to religion by the divisions and disasters of society. We have shown by what channels the mystical spirit of Alexandria permeated the religion of the West. The knight from his captors or his captives, the scholar from his studies, the monk from his perusal of the most popular of saintly authors, might all become imbued with a like spirit. Throughout the West there spread, partially, indeed, and not to all alike, a scorn of science and understanding, and a sense of mystery, an aspiration to ecstasy, a desire to merge all personality in the infinite. Such influences did not create, they did but direct the movement. They were—as M. Vacherot has shown us—a source of inspiration, a reserve of tradition for a natural instinct which, even without them, must have satisfied itself. Owing partly to these semi-religious influences, partly to the external condition of affairs, the movement—which might have established another School of Alexandria, might have believed in astrology or the philosopher’s stone, might have merely ended in jugglery and witchcraft—instead of this became a school for visionaries and ecstatics. How strong the movement was may be inferred by the length of its duration, and by our finding in its ranks not merely hysteric virgin saints, not merely the two priors of St. Victor, not merely the poetic Suso, the fervid Ruysbrock, the contemplative Tauler, but the wide intellect of Albertus Magnus, the strength of Eckhart, the practical wisdom of Gerson.

The doctrines of Neoplatonism, received through the medium of a saint, were translated into another sense by men of less intellect and stronger affections than the Alexandrines. Science is little to these later mystics, the inward spring of peace is much; they question with Bonaventura not doctrine but desire, not the human mind but heavenly grace. Not light they ask, but fire. By ecstasy they seek to unite themselves not only with the abstract wisdom, but with a supreme love. For ecstasy is to them the ars amandi, and to them the one thing needful not intelligence, but feeling. “Amor oculus est,” says Richard of Saint Victor, “et amare videre est.” To behold with this eye the things that are hidden from earthly vision; to die to the world, in order to live to Christ; to lose one’s soul; to drown self, conscience, reason, virtue, feeling, in a flood of ecstasy, this had become the ambition of the nobler spirits of the world.

In this apotheosis of ecstasy, this contagion of love, the feminine element naturally predominated. The movement, which the gracious and pathetic figure of Elizabeth of Hungary announced, was to be, above all, a movement of women. Far beyond the glory of Eckhart and Gerson, above the eminence of thinker and teacher, shone, in this strange hierarchy of dreamers, the beatitude of the visionary and prophetess. Prophets of God some, others prophets of evil; so the Church decided. But it is hard to divide the spiritual abnegation of Bridget, of Catherine, of the two German Elizabeths, of Mechtild of Magdeburg, Gertrude and Mechtild von Hackeborn, from the heresy which declared that to the soul lost in God the sins of the body are as naught. That heresy is but the others’ holiness, pushed to its logical consequence.

The saints were chiefly women—women of vague, imperious, unsatisfied emotion, sick of a world given over to rapine, interdict, and slaughter, where no choice was left between disloyalty and damnation; women young and active, living for the most part the passive, temperate eventless life of the convent; women who imposed on themselves long fasts and vigils, whose tender flesh was bruised with the stone flags of the cell where they would lie of winter nights for penance, and torn with the lashings of the self-inflicted scourge. In this life no hope for them; in this world no love, no happiness, no possessions. As starving people dream of delicious feasts and banquets, they found in a vision the things withheld from them awake.

Amor rapit, unit, satisfacit: the practical Gerson lets fall the fiery phrase. Each of these virgin visionaries had said as much. Open the books of their exercises, their revelations; the dusty pages exhale a violence and tenderness of passion that the minnesingers never caught, the troubadors never felt, in their earthly singing. For these saintly visions are all of love—love which ravishes; nay, love which drowns, annihilates, swallows up. Love in a dream, and yet the one real thing in a cramped and narrow life; love which fills every interstice and cranny of a void and aching heart; love unseen, untouched, unheard, for which the visionary waits hour by hour, in an anguish of tense devotion, waits till the muttered monotony of her prayers, the fixed, unvaried straining of her eyes, shall have lulled the body to a death-like trance, shall set free the soul to show her the mirage of her own unsatisfied desire.

I.

Throughout the thirteenth century Thuringia continued the centre and stronghold of German sanctity. The life of St. Elizabeth at the Wartburg had gone up from its midst like a purifying altar-flame to heaven. When she died in 1231, hundreds of men and women came in tears to honour the wasted body wrapped in its worn Franciscan cloak, lying dead in the poor little house at Marburg. From the memory of her life, from the pilgrimages to her tomb, a tradition and ideal of saintliness spread among the people. Fifteen years later, it was in Thuringia that the Pope found his champion. Even his oppression, and the defeat and death of that ill-starred defender of the faith did little to abate the popular ardour.

The convent of Rodardesdorf, near Eisleben, and the great princely convent of Quedlinburg, gave an especial religious distinction to Thuringia; but not until about the year 1234, when the rich and noble Freiherr von Hackeborn of Helfta placed at Rodardesdorf his little five-year-old daughter Gertrude, was the specially illustrious future of that house decided. Rodardesdorf was a convent of Cistercians, a thoughtful and peaceful place. The little Gertrude was happy there. She was a serious and earnest child, “not content,” says the chronicle, “with childish innocence, but, even when a babe, gifted with a constant gravity and prudence of demeanour.” Indeed, that childish head was troubled with many things, for the little girl was passionately eager to learn all that came in her way: science, liberal arts, grammar, theology. So that she became no less honoured for her acquirements than beloved for her docility and modesty of bearing.

But the convent was to acquire another infant saint. The mother of Gertrude again visited the convent, and on one occasion brought with her her younger daughter, Mechtild, then seven years of age, and as many years younger than her sister. “They came for honest diversion,” says the chronicle, probably to see little Gertrude, and certainly with no thought of leaving Mechtild behind. But the child was so delighted with the strange place, the large rooms, the little cells, the chapel with its altar lights, the children in the garden, the nuns who made much of her, that she declared she would willingly remain there for ever. Nor would she leave, though her mother bade her come. Then the sisters, delighted with so much holiness so young, instantly beseeched the mother to leave her little girl in their company for awhile, and to this she consented. Poor mother, did no pang go through her heart when the convent doors shut on both her children? It was for ever; no prayers, no commands could bring her back her wilful, loving, eager little Mechtild any more, for the Vita relates, “after this holy and blessed embrace her parents could never withdraw her from that place for all the caresses and endearments that they knew how to make.” With bruised ties and bleeding hearts the career of saintliness begins. “Only he,” runs the Scripture that child would often hear, “that hateth father and mother can become my disciple.”

Of the daily routine of life in the convent we may gain an idea from Abelard’s directions to the nuns of the Paraclete, and, setting against the difference of date the difference of culture in the two countries, we may not unfairly suppose the Thuringian Cistercians of 1250 to have followed much the same rule of life as the Benedictines of Heloise adopted a century earlier.

According to the code of Abelard the convent was divided into six functions, all alike subject to the direction of the abbess. The sacristan was responsible for the convent treasury; she kept the keys, and had the care of the church plate and sacred vessels; and it was her duty to set the virgin sisters to prepare the wafers for the Host, which must not be made by widows. The chantress taught singing and reading, had care of the choir and of the library, to which she was expected to add by copying and illuminating manuscripts. The head of the infirmary had charge of the sick. Another sister was mistress of the wardrobe, and responsible not only for all the spinning, weaving, and sewing necessary for the convent, but also for the tanning and cobbling. The cellarer had in her charge the wines for the altar and the sick, the provisioning of the table, and the management of whatever the convent possessed in orchards and garden-land, flocks and herds and hives, trout streams and mills. Lastly, the doorkeeper, who was especially chosen for courteous manners, judgment, and trustworthiness, was responsible for the keeping of the gate, the entertainment of guests, and the distribution of hospitality.

Life in the convent was not hard, but monotonous, eventless beyond description—a perpetual alternation of broken sleep, repeated tasks, and prayer. In the middle of the night the sisters rose for Matins, and the office over, trooped back through the darkness to the dormitory. There they slept till Lauds, which are sung at the break of day; in summer, when Lauds are early, the sisters slept again till Prime. At Prime they left the dormitory, having first washed their hands, and taking their books repaired to the cloister to read and sing until the office should begin. Service over, they all assembled in the chapter-house, where a lesson out of the Martyrology was read to them and expounded. On leaving the chapter each nun was sent to fulfil her allotted task—singing or sewing, nursing or baking—until the hour of Tierce, when mass was said. They then resumed their work till noon, the sixth hour, which was the convent dinner-time, except on fast-days, when it was postponed till Nones, or in Lent, when nothing was eaten till after Vespers at four. The convent fare was simple and spare. Save for the sick, no wine; stale bread of coarse flour; roots and greens, and at discretion of the abbess a portion of unflavoured meat on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. From the autumn equinox till Easter, on account of the shortness of the days, this one meal was considered sufficient for all save the infirm.

After dinner, in summer-time, the sisters slept till Nones; in the two hours between that office and Vespers they were set to finish their task, but at four the day’s work was done. Between the spring and autumn equinoxes the sisters were permitted a light refreshment after Vespers. It was the only time when fruit might be eaten. This light supper over, Compline began. Then they all sought the dormitory again. On Saturday evenings they were a little later, as then the sisters were enjoined to purify themselves—that is to say, to wash their hands and feet, a function which the abbess or lay-sisters were specially directed to supervise. This done, they slept till the midnight matin-bell should clang them from their beds.

Out of such a life of dreary monotony, the same task day by day, or another exactly like it, the same prayer, the same lesson, always of saints and martyrs; out of this life of forced privation, this half-starved life of chants and broken dreams, who can wonder that (Μορφή μία) visions, mysteries, scandals, witchcraft continually arose. The two little children prospered in the convent which was at first merely a school for them, and an excellent school. Gertrude, the silent, studious, ambitious scholar, found there more books and better teachers than she could have had at home; and, so long as her soul was set on learning and studying, the homage paid her as a child set apart for God only served as a spur to her ambition. “She ever would increase her natural beauty of soul by saintly customs, adding to it the splendour and the sweetness of all manner of flowered virtues, so that she should be more pleasing in the eyes of every one,” says the chronicle in which after her death the nuns of Helfta embalmed her virtues. But while little Gertrude laboured so hard to make herself desirable, Mechtild, quite simply and without effort, won all hearts to herself. Although she was not so learned nor so grave as her sister, though once she had told a lie (the one lie of her life), boasting to her companions that she had seen a thief in the court, where thief was none; though, judging from a later vision, she had sometimes looked back from the plough and longed for her mother’s love: ay, though no early holiness had, as with Gertrude, foretold the saint, and only after her entrance to the convent had manifested itself in her; despite all this, Mechtild was the loved one. While Gertrude in the library was toiling hard at grammar that her mind might be worthy of God and the love of her companions, Mechtild standing in the garden was surrounded with listeners, hanging on the words of her fanciful allegories as she expounded the message of God. While Gertrude was making extracts from the Fathers and compiling treasuries of Scripture to help the souls of the sisterhood, Mechtild, like a little mother, was going among the sick, speaking, ministering to each, giving help and comfort to all in affliction. As they grew older it was still the same—Gertrude putting her soul into her studies, Mechtild into her life; Gertrude absorbed and wise, with no one friend preferred to any other; Mechtild every one’s darling, beset with every one’s confidences “to the impediment of the sweet quiet of her soul.” Gertrude the humanist, Mechtild the human.

II.

So far all was right and fair. Each child naturally selected the education fitted to its wants, and became wise or loving as the need was. But when they came to full girlhood they did not quit this school whose teaching they had outgrown. These girls were, since their childhood, cloistered nuns dedicated to God. But only when their childhood was over could they appreciate the meaning of their vow. To Mechtild it did not greatly matter; her life in the world might have been fuller and richer, in the convent it was not wasted. She was so easily interested in others, so gifted to soothe the sick and suffering, so naturally humble and unselfish, that even the consciousness of sanctity could not injure her nature; in her visions, even, she rarely announces her own glory. It is Gertrude that she sees in the bosom of the Father, and she hears the Divine Voice proclaim, “Gertrude is far greater than this Mechtild.” More often her visions are messages of consolation to those she has pitied and laboured for awake. She sees the dead baby of a certain sorrowing mother clad in scarlet and gold, and greatly glorified in heaven. She beholds God and the Virgin standing by the bed of one of the sisters who is sick unto death; or else her visions are tender and poetic fancies. She sees the Father giving all the saints to drink of the Fountain of Mercy. She sees the Heart of God burning like a lamp; or, again, she beholds the sacred rose that blooms in the Heart of God; or, lastly, her visions supply the needs of her maimed and stinted life. Kneeling on the floor of her cell, this loving woman, with no natural ties, often sees God come to her as a little child of five years old, and, in a dream, God gives her His love, at last, to be her mother, “to care for her and lead her as a mother her child.” Or she dreams, this woman with her love of colour and beauty, of beautiful women in splendid raiment. Mary comes to her in a gown the colour of air, sewn all over with tiny flowers of gold, and embroidered round the neck and sleeves with the holy monogram of Jesus. Or she comes in a pale green cloak, latticed over with gold, with the head of Christ in every lattice. St. Catherine of Alexandria appears in dull crimson, covered over with gold embroidery of little wheels, fastened at the breast with a clasp of two meeting hands of gold. Christ appears young and beautiful, in rose-coloured silk, stiff with gold and jewels, “yet not to be thrown away because so heavy, but rather ennobled,” as the soul with the heavy gems of grief. Or she sees the least saint in Paradise, a youth of middle height, wonderfully lovely, most fair of face, his hair crisply curling, of a colour between green and white, clad all in green. Never, out of Meister Stefan’s pictures, were there such deep colours, such quaintly-patterned gowns and mantles, such jewels and embroideries as figure in the visions of this poor little sallow saint, asleep herself in her darned serge and yellowed linen, and always clad, by her own choice, in the worst clothes of the convent, torn and patched in all corners.

The real dangers of mysticism have little power over a soul so sweet and naïve as this. But it was otherwise with Gertrude. She was a woman of passionate intensity of imagination, of an ever-active and ambitious mind. During her childhood this had been wisely exercised in study. Had she gone then into the world life and learning would have employed it for her. Had she been a secular sister like Catherine of Siena, a wandering preacher and prophetess, like Mechtild of Magdeburg, or an avowedly learned and reforming abbess, like Heloise or Teresa, she would, perhaps, have been most useful and happiest of all. But, when she grew up, when she perceived the real aim of her cloistered life, her learning became odious to her. What had the vain lore of this world to do with the appointed spouse of Christ? “While this virgin was continuing the study of the humanities,” relates the Vita, “she became aware that this study was a region too remote from the similitude of Christ, perceiving that too hungrily she had longed after human learning, for which reason she had not until that moment disposed her heart to receive Divine illumination. She knew then (and not without passionate sighs coming from the heart) that until this time she had been deprived both of the consolations and of the illuminations of Divine wisdom, since she had remained intent on human things.”

A terrible conflict, a terrible temptation. With Gertrude’s earnest nature there could be but one end. She cut off from her the hungry and passionate love of human learning as she would have cut off a limb or plucked out an eye to enter, maimed but holy, into Paradise. With tears, and anguish, and bitter agony of prayer, she maimed her soul. But not always does the mutilated member heal. Woe to those whom nature punishes for their temerity with mortification, with numb and creeping death.

Now that Gertrude had, of her own will, shut off from herself all her former means of progress and employment, how should she spend her time? She was not, like Mechtild, by nature a sick-nurse and a confidant; she had not, like Mechtild, a beautiful voice which she could cultivate for the service of God; and to her dominant eager nature it was necessary to do something and to do it better than any one else. The one remnant of all her studies which she permitted herself was the translation of Latin prayers into German for the benefit of more ignorant sisters, and at this she would persevere the whole day long. But this oft-repeated, almost mechanical employment could not fill her mind, could open no vista to her ambition. There was, indeed, only one road that she could follow; all the circumstances of her life converged to the same vanishing point.

When she remembered, in the long vacant hours of sleeping or copying, the books she used to read, what thoughts would they naturally suggest to her? She had, we may be sure, read no books that would give her visions of the world outside—poems of Virgil the magician, or the minnesingers. To her the humanities were themselves books of theology; the writings of the fathers of the Church, a tract of St. Bonaventura’s it may be, or one of the sermons of Eckhart or of Albertus Magnus (then at the prime of their renown), certainly the works of Dionysius Areopagita. What would they have taught her, these books which she had given up to imitate the lowliness of Christ? They told her, one and all, how much more desirable was feeling than reason, ecstasy than care for others, faith than works; how far above all natural tenderness of human charity was the virtus infusa, the theological virtue, the love of God. Every hour of her life must have repeated the lesson. The eight offices of the day, the lesson from the Martyrology, which was all the food this hungry and active mind was given to fast upon; the daily task of copying prayers; the long, weary misery of being no one, in no true position. All these things must have spoken to this earnest, self-preoccupied Gertrude, who had toiled so long to make herself pleasing in the eyes of every one; and, now, knowing so well what was necessary, would she not strive in prayer for this last, dearest gift? Would she not set herself to learn this one thing needful? Most likely she had not long to pray, nor ever consciously began to learn, before the gift was granted, the science acquired, the strong mind weakened and perverted, the student an ecstatic.

III.

From that first moment of vision the fame of Gertrude grew so high and so rapidly, that when in 1251 the abbess of Rodardesdorf expired, this girl-ecstatic of nineteen was elected her successor. It is strange that the duties of her new position, the great responsibilities of so famous a convent, did not draw her from her visions; but the influence of the time was strong, and the abbess of Rodardesdorf was beset by no imperious need for reform. There was no cleansing work of righteousness to be performed in that well-ordered house of high-born mystical ladies. All that Gertrude could do was, seven years after her nomination, when the springs of Rodardesdorf dried up, to remove the convent to her own castle of Helfta, an act which naturally increased her own position in the convent, and tripled her glory of abbess, benefactress, and ecstatic. Gertrude, however, was not the only saint in Helfta. Besides her sister, the sweet, fanciful Saint Mechtild, there was Gertrude the Nun,[^[3]] sometimes confounded with the abbess, who in all probability wrote the concluding book of the Vita, certainly finished after St. Gertrude’s death. The two daughters of the Count of Mansfeld were also professed in the convent, and were gifted disciples of its mystical doctrines. Sophia spent her life in enriching the already valuable library of Helfta, and Elizabeth painted, probably in the chapel.

In 1265 the convent, already the high school of ecstasy in the north of Germany, received a more famous woman than any of these. This was our Mechtild of Magdeburg, whose earnest faith and flashing, passionate eloquence, whose songs inspired with a wild, strange tenderness, whose life of hardship and adventure for the love of Christ, had rendered her one of the noblest and most endearing figures of her age. She chose Helfta to be the home of her declining years, and added another glory to the convent of St. Gertrude and St. Mechtild.

Such a house, it may be supposed, did not exhaust the spiritual energies of a nature so full of force and so ambitious as that of its young abbess. Her surroundings were but an added incentive to her aspiring soul. She worked hard, it is true, aided by her sister Mechtild. Every day she visited the infirmary and saw that the sick were well and cleanly treated. She ruled her nuns with thought and care; but when the hours of leisure came, the many daily periods set apart for prayer and meditation, then her old ecstasy overpowered her with a strength and vividness the more forcible for the obstacles it had to overcome. More passionate, more personal become her revelations as she lies abandoned to trance and vision in the arms of the spiritual Lover. So strong, so hot, so fierce, so tender are the words that fall from her lips, that we cannot bear them now unmoved. Ah me! what vain and fruitless passion this dreaming love of the saint for a dream!

It was not until nine years after the bestowal of the “singular grace of divine familiarity,” says the Vita that Gertrude wrote down the description of her visions. But the visions, themselves recorded in the five books of her revelations, seem to have begun almost immediately after her renunciation of human learning. “From that time she began to hold as vile all visible and external things, and verily not without a cause, for from that time the Lord opened to her the ways of Mount Zion, a place of joy and consolation. Leaving the study of grammar, in which she was greatly instructed, she turned to theology, that is to say, Holy Scripture and the lives of the saints, using them with infinite diligence.”

And soon the saint herself began to speak from the mount, in her own language. None of the tender consolations and quaintly pictured fancies of Mechtild are here. The revelations of Gertrude manifest the ambition, the activity, the emotion of a crushed and passionate nature forced into an unnatural channel. Tragic and miserable spectacle: the strong passion, the earnest will so sorely wanted in the world outside, are spent vainly, vilely, in inducing terrible disease. The saint grows weaker as her visions increase in force; her mind, warped and broken, can bend but one way. And that way is towards inertia, madness, and annihilation. An old tale, oft-repeated, yet needed, perhaps, in these days of mesmerism and spiritual séances. An old tale, well-known to the Yogis of India, to the monks and nuns of mediæval Europe, to all who have deliberately made themselves the victims of catalepsy and hysteria. For deliberately they did it. Many of the receipts have come down to us: the absolute cessation from practical affairs, the emptiness of mind and heart; the regulated diet, neither too little nor too much; the lack of sleep; the quiet, which no joy or woe of others may disturb, when, seated or kneeling in his cell, at an hour when digestion is well over, sighing lugubriously in deep, regular sighs, the eyes are fixed on one point too high or too low for perfect comfort, the arms are to beat the breast in monotonous routine, as Gerson and other mystical doctors prescribe, until a heavy trance involves the body, until the brain becomes deranged by this appalling and stultifying monotony, and creeping death or madness end the vision.

“It happened once,” says the Vita, “that by reason of sickness, Gertrude was prevented from attending vespers; and, longing for these, and feeling sick at heart, she turned to the Lord, and said: ‘O my Master, were it not more praiseworthy that I should now be singing in the choir with my other companions and hearing the prayers and the other regular exercises than to be lying in this weakness, in which I consume in negligence so many hours?’[hours?’] To which He answered: ‘Oh, dost thou believe the bridegroom holds his bride less dear, when he stayeth at home to taste the familiarity of his domestic pleasure, than when he glories to lead her forth, well adorned, before the gaze of the crowd?’ from which speech she understood that, in the divine service, the soul appears as a bride going forth; but, when heavily laden with bodily infirmities, then as a bride sleeping in the secret chamber; for the more that man is weak, shorn of all pleasures of the sense, destitute and impotent, the more is he made to delight the Lord.”

Such a theory was naturally productive of fasts and vigils, nor, if the favour of her Lord depended on the sickness of her body, could it ever have been far from this poor ailing and anæmic girl. A revolting amount of suffering is naïvely and incidentally revealed in her works of spiritual grace. Scarce a chapter but opens, “Being again sorely weak from want of sustenance,” “Lying again in bed helpless with sickness,” “Being sorely oppressed with a burning of the liver,” or with some similar avowal of the connection between her revelations and the weakness of her health. Often she piteously implores the Lord to restore her to her former soundness and well-being, but the answer is always the same. “Thy sickness is a dance and a festival for me,” responds the Celestial Spouse; nor ever is there any hope given her of a cessation to her pain. In her wandering senses the poor tormented saint dimly guessed that her spiritual gifts were dependent on the utter prostration of her body and her mind.

The spectacle of her suffering convinced the whole convent of Gertrude’s sanctity. They believed her in daily communication with their unseen Head. It was natural, therefore, that they should bring their sorrows to her and entreat her intercession, as men ask a minister to counsel the king, or a steward to remedy the carelessness of the absent master, or a favoured mistress to beg that, for her love’s sake, a piece of justice may be granted that otherwise were withheld. It was natural, also, that Gertrude should believe herself capable of guiding the will of God; natural that the strange vanity of the visionary and the hysteric should obscure the eyes of her mind, and lead her further on the road she had chosen. After visions, miracles.

IV.

Miracles exist in the mind of the witnesses. “Le miracle,” said Lamennais, “existe quand on y croit.” To the latter-day sceptic, the marvels which procured the canonization of Gertrude are such natural trifles that it is difficult to imagine they could ever have filled a whole countryside with rapture and thanksgiving[thanksgiving]. A sudden downfall of rain, the ceasing of a shower, the finding of a needle—such are her miracles. But hear with what pomp and circumstance the chronicler narrates them.

“One evening when the nuns had finished supper, they went into the court to finish a certain piece of work that they were set to do, and it happened that at this time the sun still shone, notwithstanding that in the sky there were several clouds which threatened rain; wherefore she, sighing, began heartily to converse with the Lord, I hearing all she said, as follows: ‘O Lord God, Creator of everything, I do not wish that thou, as if compelled, should obey the will of me unworthy; none the less would it be very dear to me, if pleasing to Thee, if Thy most liberal goodness shouldst prevail against Thine honest justice to retard a little, for my sake, this rain. None the less, Thy will be done.’ She said these latter words resigning herself into the hands of God, not thinking of aught but the fulfilment of His good pleasure; a marvellous thing it must certainly be accounted, that scarcely had she finished speaking when lightning, thunder, and great drops of rain burst forth with great fury; for which cause, moved with pity for the other sisters, she remained altogether filled with fear, and again she said to the Lord, ‘Let Thy goodness, O most clement God, last at least so long as while we finish our appointed task.’ At these words the most clement God, to show how in everything He was pleased to grant her prayer, held up the rain until the nuns had finished the task they were at work upon; which done, they returned to the convent, and scarcely had they reached the gate when there began a tempest of rain and thunder and lightning, so that some of the sisters who had lingered behind could not enter the door before they were soaked to the skin.”

V.

Gertrude was the saint of the convent, and yet her ambition cannot have been wholly realized. She, who ever since her childhood had laboured hard to acquire “all manner of flowered virtues in order to please the eyes of every one,” she, the favoured of God, was nevertheless in the convent less beloved than simple Mechtild. The fact is revealed unconsciously in every page of her life, in all the numerous revelations when God declares that notwithstanding the convent’s suffrage, Gertrude is greater than Mechtild. And greater she was—more passionate, strong, and earnest, suffering anguish and burning with great desires that her sweet and happy sister could not conceive. Love was necessary to her, love and approbation. They were the very food of her soul. Reading side by side her revelations and her life, one easily comprehends how in proportion as she failed to gain the love and tenderness of her companions, her visions become erotic and passionate. To give such a nature respect, esteem, awe, as a reward for its sacrifice, is in bitterest truth to give a stone to the child crying for bread. Gertrude being hungry dreamed of a feast; phantasmal banquets which nourish not, but madden.

As time went on, Gertrude transferred all her earnestness, all her powers of feeling, from the outer world to this dream-born inner life. Censorious, abstracted, caring little for physical suffering, she was tender and anxious to the last degree in all matters that concerned the soul. And this without any interest in the personality of the creature she longed to save. She had, says her biographer, not one friend so dear that to save her she would by so much as one word commit an offence against perfect justice, and would declare that rather would she consent to the injury of her own mother than harbour an evil thought against an enemy. Her conversation was in heaven, and the things of the world were as dust to her. Nay, as poison. She was as careful as Pascal[^[4]] by no word of hers ever to draw to herself the heart of any person; it was not for her who was beloved of God to unite herself in earthly friendship, and as one would fly a person stricken with a pestilent disease, she fled from any one who sought her affection. Never now could she endure to hear a word of earthly love; rather would she remain deprived of the services and the goodwill of all the world than ever consent that, by reason of human favour the heart of any should be joined to hers.

So says the chronicle. Yet with all this bitter indifference, this love turned sour in her heart, she kept a great tenderness for erring or tormented souls, praying and watching for them, warning and consoling; and though the sinner proved obdurate, not yet would she relax her care; nay, when the sisters besought her not to afflict herself for the sins of the ungodly[ungodly], she would answer that she would rather suffer death than console herself for the misery of those who would only understand their own perdition when at last they should stand in face of the eternal expiation. So great was her compassion, that did she only hear of any one sick in spirit, be he never so far away, she could not rest without endeavouring to console his sorrow. And as men laid low with fever exist from day to day in the hope of recovery, watching themselves to see if they are not a little better, so she longed and watched from hour to hour that the Lord might console the mourner and ease him in his affliction.

Strange and pathetic this zeal for the indefinable and impersonal soul, concerning itself nowise with character or feeling, with mind or physical well-being. Strange and awful this transmuted love, this transformed humanity and kindness, which deal with unrealities while all around a world sickens and dies. Yet not so strange if we remember that to exchange the reality for the shadow, the thought for the dream, and truth for a phantasm, is the principle of mysticism.

VI.

Meanwhile Mechtild, a mystic by doctrine and circumstance, but not by temperament, concerned herself, even in the convent, chiefly with the affairs of reality. She was, as we have seen, every one’s friend, nurse, and confidant, and but slenderly concerned with saintly glories for herself. She never wrought any miracles, nor did God ever tell her that she was His most favoured among women. It was Gertrude’s glory that she declared. The saintly acts that are recorded of her have a pathetic human grotesqueness never to be found in Gertrude’s doings or sayings. For instance, out of a great pity for the sins of the mummers and dancers at carnival, she filled her bed full of potsherds and broken glass, and rolled in them till she was a mass of cuts and sores, begging God to accept her suffering as a set-off to the merry-making of the world outside. This is not the true mystical temper, which ignores all but the union of the soul with God. Mechtild sought no advancement for her own soul, she sought to palliate the offences of the guilty and to save them from punishment rather than bring them to repentance; moreover she felt herself responsible for their errors. The true ecstatic, lost in God, abjures human responsibility. Nevertheless, even in the convent, Mechtild, with her merry patience in suffering, her care for the sick body no less than the sick soul, her humility and lovingness, was naturally dearer than her austere, abstracted sister-saint. And, none the less, the sisterhood was aware that Gertrude not Mechtild was their real title to honour.

As the mystical life spread like a contagion through the convent, many of the younger sisters, underfed, deprived of air and exercise, had not strength to support the abnormal existence of the visionary. Sickness was frequent in this convent of ecstatics, and whether at Rodardesdorf or at Helfta its mortality was excessive. The nuns died young of undefined diseases. We are always meeting allusions to their short, dream-visited lives, to their early and inexplicable dying. They perish of anæmia, before the acknowledgedly consumptive sisters; and the nuns can find no reason for their death unless it be that God was anxious to remove so much sweetness to flourish perpetually in His presence. The diseases of the convent are such physical ills as are induced by mental strain and by bodily inanition—consumption, hysteric convulsions, or paralysis, disturbances of the liver. Such as cannot die—such as, like Gertrude herself, have too strong a fibre to perish in girlhood—linger, tormented by sickness, prematurely old and useless. All they have to console them is the phrase, vouchsafed by her heavenly bridegroom to Gertrude in vision, “Lo! ye that fain would hasten into my presence, ye are as a spouse that bare and unadorned would venture into the nuptial chamber; know, that after this death which ye so much desire, no further grace can accrue to the soul, nor can it suffer any more for God’s sake.”

Mechtild of Magdeburg, Dante’s Matilda, was the first of the greater saints to succumb. A long life of hardship, of energetic striving with a guilty world, years of Beguine Prophecy, much labour of writing and preaching, and the pain of bodily weariness, had worn her out. At the age of sixty-seven the strongest and sweetest of all the German women-mystics departed from a world which she had not shrunk to face, which even from her cloister she had striven to ennoble. The strong, reforming spirit was stilled at last. The one woman in the convent of Helfta who knew the world as it is, its sins and aspirations, its generosities and crimes, was dead. A window was shut in that house, a window showing the world beyond the chapel walls, and letting in upon the heavy smell of flickering candles and swinging censers the free breath of the wind. Henceforth there was no reminder of the larger world, the purer air outside: Mechtild of Magdeburg was dead.

VII.

No such release was appointed for Gertrude; the easy death of the body was not for her, though for death she prayed by day and by night, finding that her prayers for health and strength were never granted. Nailed to her mattress by exceeding weakness, she watched the younger nuns die, one by one, “admitted to the celestial marriage-chambers,” while she, faint, palsied, useless, lingered on. “O, my God,” she cries, “could I not serve Thee better with my old strength than thus?” And ever the soul-heard answer comes, that the more humbled the body, the poorer the proud intellect of man, so much the dearer to God is his spiritual essence. Thus dragged on year after year, and the great abbess filled her five books of revelations and her eight books of spiritual exercises. Her life was spent and she was old. The later hagiographers relate of Saint Gertrude that she died of a languor of Divine love. Modern science would call by another name this long palsy of the body through the prostration of the mind. But no diagnosis, saintly or scientific, can add to the sense of misery and waste with which we recall that strong life so early broken, those twenty-five years of strained nerves and aching limbs, that six-months-long daily death of hysterical paralysis.

“This elect of God,” relates the Vita, “full of the Holy Spirit and worthy to be embraced by the arms of Divine charity, Gertrude, most benign abbess, all-praiseworthy, having laboured for forty years and as many days in the honour and praise of God, ruling her abbey wisely and with much prudence, sweetly, and with much discretion, being by reason of all these virtues flowery as a fresh rose in this world, and marvellously gracious and worthy to be loved, not by God only, but by mankind as well, at last, after forty years and forty days, fell into a grievous sickness, which is known as minor palsy, a form of apoplexy.”

The narrators of the life, who knew Gertrude and had often seen her, say no word, it will be perceived, of the celestial love-sickness which a more sentimental taste gave out afterwards to be the cause of her death. And, indeed, such a superstition could not rise, even round so great a saint, while the physical details of her last weakness remained fresh in the minds of the nuns of Helfta. They mourned her truly, and believed that never a holier saint had been translated to those pleasant fields of heavenly green for which she had so often longed. But, with an admirable naïveté, even while they believed that God had drawn her miraculously from her sick bed into His arms, they knew that she had died of palsy. To them there was nothing incongruous in the two ideas; they had no thought of concealing—they would rather display—the degradations and infirmities of the mere human body which had so long enchained the heavenly soul. At first her senses remained to her, only she could not move her limbs, could not stir the wasted hands that once had been so swift to sew, to write, to put in order whatever was out of place. She could lie still and dream, the poor, dying mystic.

For she had given to her now, as a gift that should not be taken away, that perfect quiescence and immobility of body which she had practised so often, so patiently, by day and night, in times gone past. And soon she was to be granted that other wing of ecstasy, complete abstraction of the mind from all human thoughts and affairs. So heavy became the burden of her infirmity that she could no longer order the affairs of the household, no longer care for others. At last she could not speak, she could not pray, she could not think. She was perfected in the mystical way; annihilated, stultified, palsied, she had attained the summit of her desire. Never moving, never changing, dead-alive, she lay there month by month, a helpless burden upon the community. Worshipped as one indeed highly favoured of the Lord by those whose feet were all set on the same sterile and deadly road, she could give utterance to no other words but these, “My soul!” And this phrase she repeated over and over again, finding it marvellously ample and sufficient to express all the movements of the spirit. O pitiless ideal, O cruel and revolting doctrine, is it to this you would reduce the living, thinking, active human mind? Is the end of such continued sacrifice, such years of hourly, daily labour nothing but this—a palsied useless body, a dumb, numb soul, with no thought and no desire beyond itself? At length the hour of dissolution was at hand, the night in which no man shall work; and in waiting for this the days of life had gone by fruitless and wasted; in hoping for this the sun had risen and set in vain, the seasons had changed unnoticed; in preparation for this soul and heart and mind and physical powers had deliberately hamstrung their noblest faculties; and now the long-awaited night was at hand, the night in which all mistakes are forgotten, all cares and anguish set at rest.

The last time that Gertrude spoke these two all-sufficing words, “My soul!” was one evening when Compline was at an end. Then began her passage to the other life. At this time, fables the author of the end of the Vita, in quaint allegorical eulogy, not only the chamber of the dying abbess, but the whole of the monastery, was crowded and thronged to excess, since among the praying and weeping sisterhood knelt all the virgin company of heaven.

“At length the happy hour was come when the Celestial and Imperial Spouse should receive His beloved in His house of love, finally, after so much longing, set free of the prison of the world.” The nuns knelt round praying and weeping; the watching sisters saw angels kneeling too. And we, do we not see the ghosts of stillborn pity, and joy, and love, and help, standing white-eyed and shadowy there? Yet wherefore should all or any weep? The end is at hand; the labour is over and gone, and soon she will rest so well that, even if she could, she would not quit her quiet bed. Well may she sleep, poor, troubled soul, mistaken and most noble in its errors; well may she sleep who, being dead, yet speaks with a clearer and surer voice than she spoke with on earth, telling of patience and sacrifice borne willingly for love’s sake, of faithful endurance through pain and toil, teaching an example and a warning in one word. And in the middle of their praying none heard at what moment the sleeping spirit went. The abbess was dead; but the convent went on as though she had been still alive. Another abbess took her place; another nun saw visions and worked miracles in her stead, a lesser saint but of the same quality. Even after Mechtild’s death some years after, the old life went on—the old routine of sleep and prayer, or of forced wakeful nights and baneful ecstasy; and the old life of insufficient food and insufficient thought begot the old aberrations and diseases. The fever had not yet run its course.

We standing here, safe, as we imagine, from the deadly epidemic, curiously studying these eight hundred closely printed pages as records of morbid hysteria, may feel our hearts melt with a melancholy regret for the shipwreck of so many noble lives. For the worst of this malady was that it attacked the loftiest spirits, as phylloxera the oldest and most fruitful vines. We may pity and praise them in a breath; we may give a kindly wonder to their belated love and say that, but for them, the sentiments that fills our hearts to-day would have been less patient, less tender, less exalted. And this is well, that we should honour the best in them. But let us take care that we ourselves are free and whole; let us not deem ourselves too safe, but place a quarantine on our own souls lest the sweet and fatal poison of mysticism penetrate thither unawares.

[3]. Herr Preger, notwithstanding the authority of other scholars, and the entire tradition of the Church, maintains the Gertruden-buch to be the work not of Gertrude von Hackeborn, but of a certain Gertrude the Nun, living at the same time in the same convent. He also, in an argument of great ingenuity, separates Mechtild the chantress from our Mechtild von Hackeborn, to whom, however he leaves the authorship of her works; but as in the Venetian edition of the Vita (1583 and 1605), I find the words, “Now Gertrude, with her sister Mechtild the chantress, managed all the affairs of the convent,” with constant indications of the identity of Gertrude the abbess and Gertrude the saint; and as Lansperg, the earliest chronicler, expressly states them both to be the daughters of the Graf von Hackeborne, I have decided in this one matter not to accept the dictate of a scholar, to whom all students of the subject must remain indebted.

[4]. “La vraie et unique vertue et donc de se haïr. Il est injuste qu’on s’attache à moi, quoiqu’on le fasse avec plaisir et volontairement. Je tromperais ceux à qui j’en ferais naître le désir; car je ne suis la fin de personne et n’ai pas de quoi les satisfaire:” Pascal told his married sister she ought not to caress her own children or suffer them to caress her.

The Attraction of the Abyss.

I.

As an island is surrounded by water, as night surrounds the stars, and air the globe, so beyond the region of the known there stretches an illimitable space of darkness and of silence. All minds know that it is there; to many of us it is a background of repose to the busy scene of life; to some the hidden tract has its chart of faith or dogma. But there are others to whom that vast and dark Unknown is more present than the small and shining certainty of the Universe. They are sucked into the eddy of its vastness and its darkness. These natures turn from the substance to dream of the shadow, they leave the narrow fields of science and go out boldly over those unsounded waters beyond. Souls such as these are never quite at home in life: the dark, the undreamed of, the infinite has enchanted them. They are drawn by the attraction of the Abyss.

Mysticism allures different men by different methods. It draws by various lines the passionate heart, the broken and humbled will, the heated fancy, the indignant spirit wroth at the hardness and evil of the world. It draws no less the reasoning and metaphysical mind, repelled by dogma and yet desirous of the Deity. For Mysticism is not only an affair of dreams, of miracles, and visions, it is not only a satisfaction to disordered imaginations, to diseased and stunted passions; it includes a system of philosophy so logical that who accepts the first easy thesis arrives without negation or amazement at the last. The Mystics have, in fact, made a science of the soul, an elaborate system of abstractions, quite logical in itself, although in contradiction to the truths of physical nature. No one, indeed, is readier to admit this contradiction than the Mystic himself, for the soul, he says, is exactly the contrary of the body. It is therefore natural that as bodily life rises in the scale from simple to complex, so the soul’s existence should be purest when least differentiate. For the soul and the body meet on one level for a moment, but they come from different positions. The human body is the highest evolution of the animate world; the human soul, the Mystics assure us, is the lowest and last descent of Infinite Being. In fact, the soul of man is to Divinity in the same relation as the zoophyte is to us. Only, unfortunately for the simile, in this strange supernatural cosmos the zoophyte is higher than the man. Let us rather say that man, having progressed from the zoophyte to humanity in body, must now in soul ascend from the man to the zoophyte. For the soul, we must remember, is divinest when most simple. It is the last descent of God, and God (the Mystics say) is absolute unity and simplicity. “God,” says Meister Eckhart, “is the simplest essence of existence; and who, thinking of God, sees any distinction from utter simplicity, be sure he seeth not God.”

II.

“But how” (we can imagine one of Eckhart’s audience exclaiming), “how can the absolutely simple be the manifold? God, you say, is the Simple and the One; and yet you say that every soul descends from God. If God is absolutely simple and single, He cannot divide Himself into many souls.” Eckhart here, we may be sure, would smile and praise the discretion of his assailant; for this objection brings us to the central theory of Speculative Mysticism, the dearest dogma of Plotinus, of Dionysius, of Scotus Erigena, as of Master Eckhart.

Spirit is everywhere one. Spirit is in the Godhead and indivisible. The Godhead exists, our Mystics tell us, above and beyond all Divine theophanies; the Godhead exists as a vast and unfathomable ocean, rolling its seas of emptiness and silence from pole to pole. But everywhere the ocean is bordered by the land; and its waters, in the circle of their tides, wash over a hundred shores, and fill a thousand bays and creeks and little rocky pools. Even as the deep sea sends its shallower waters over the sands, and then withdraws them into its eternal and unfathomable fulness, so the waters of God flow into every soul. And when the sea withdraws its tide, it withdraws not merely the contents of this pool and yonder creek, but the sea itself, eternally undivided, though for the space of a tide it filled the limits and the hollows of the shore.

But not all the strand, is washed by the sea; above a certain line the sands grow their rank, stiff grass, and grey-green thistles; the sands are almost land. And not the whole of the soul is visited by the Divine simplicity; only the water-line, the arid depth of the soul, is swept over and filled by the infinite being of God. “There is something in the soul,” taught Meister Eckhart, “uncreated and uncreatable; there is something in the soul which is beyond the soul, Divine, simple, an utter nothingness; there is a place in the soul where God inhabits, and this base of the soul is one with the base of God. And to reach this obscure retreat of the Eternal and Divine, where the unconscious Godhead dwells—this is the supreme and final goal of all created things.”

III.

And how shall the Mystic reach this obscure and inner depth, this silence where the soul is one with God? By sinking into himself. For the Mystic there exists no exterior world. Since God is within us, what value is there in the world without? “Omnes creaturæ sunt purum nihil,” formulates Master Eckhart. For the Mystic the body is only a prison, a distortion, a hindrance; its senses, its experience cannot teach him. “Being freed from the folly of the body,” said Plato, “we shall of ourselves know the whole real essence.” “Matter,” says Plotinus, “is the principle of individuation, and who would seek the one must quit the things of matter.” Without the body, then, we were no longer personal, no longer separate; we were all One and all God. It is the body which determines our character; there is no personality in the soul. We must conceive it as pure water poured into a coloured vase, which becomes red, or blue, or green, according to the colour of the vase. The colour is not a principle of the water, and does not affect the water. So the soul poured into the body appears to take a note and colour of its own, but, poured out again, is seen to be unaltered. The first aim of the true Mystic is to purify his spirit from this extraneous and earthly tint; to make the vase, if he can, as colourless, as simple and uniform as that infinite Being, of which, in Erigena’s phrase, the Soul is the last descent.

Since the soul is God the world is nothing. No more than the eye can taste or the ear handle, can the created comprehend the Divine. “If we are to know anything purely,” we read again in Plato, “we must be separate from the body.” And Plotinus adds that he who enters in quest of the One must ascend to the First Principle of his own nature. The First Principle of Plotinus is the same as Meister Eckhart’s Foundation of the Soul. It is the One. Intellect may be a means to reach it, but it is certainly not an end. The Mystic philosopher thinks himself into an ecstasy; and the ecstasy, not the thought, is his goal.

Our Mystic has therefore abandoned the world, and abandoned his own experience in the endeavour to attain to God. He must be quite still, passive, dumb; the mystic should be as a new-born child who has not yet smiled in his mother’s face. He must not even will to be made one with God. “He must have no seeking for himself more than has a corpse,” writes Eckhart. “Let him be as one dead,” counsels Suso. “He must not be satisfied with any deed or virtue,” adds the Flemish Ruysbroch, “but only in the Abyss.” And Tauler rises to a passionate eloquence: “Sink thou into thy Depth and thy Nothingness, and let the tower and all its bells fall down upon thee; yea, let all the devils in Hell storm out upon thee; let Heaven and Earth with all their creatures assail thee, yet shall they all but marvellously serve thee.... Sink thou only into thy Nothingness, and the better part is thine.”

IV.

Death in life is the aim of the Mystic, and his consolation is the thought of his annihilation. There is not any rest for him, and no solace save in that which Suso calls “the desolate wilderness and deep chasm of unsearchable Deity.” To us of a later age to whom the greatest and most alluring promise of religion is the hope of Personal Immortality, it is hard to realize a fact which must strike every student; namely, that throughout the Middle Ages the most passionate motive of a hundred passionate sects, the dearest thesis of the deepest thinkers in the Church, was this intense desire of personal annihilation. As a fact, this frenzy after Nothingness cost the Church more heresies than any corruption in herself. The very doctors of the Church were tainted with it. The lowest of the people—poor, starved, and hunted fanatics—formed themselves into bands and brotherhoods to preach this comforting gospel of extinction. The books of Dionysius the Areopagite carried the Alexandrian theories of the One into every monastery in Europe. The Almaricians, the Vaudois, the followers of Ortlieb, the Beguines, the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit, and many other sects of poor and wandering people, spread their fantastic corruptions of the same, throughout the working classes. From the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, the desire of many a mystical saint was identical with the despair of atheists to-day. It was the extinction of the personal soul. The whirligig of time brings strange revenges.

Mysticism throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries occupied, in the thinking and religious world, a position almost identical with that of Spiritualism in our day. Like its modern offshoot, mediæval Mysticism could be superimposed on any cult or habit; like Spiritualism, it lent itself equally to a grossly sensual, or an abstract and idealist interpretation. And Mysticism, therefore, appealed to an immense audience; to the ignorant and pretentious, dissatisfied with the Church’s authority, merely because it was authority; to the pure reformers, anxious to preserve religion and quit the formal and corrupted shows of it; to tender, pious, and dreaming souls, with no great hold upon the world of fact; to the abstract reasoner, eager to preserve his faith while letting untenable dogma slip away. The authorized religion occupied a singular position towards these Mystics, who formed, as it were, a Church within the Church. Afraid to quite disown them or, indeed, to openly disapprove, lest she might thereby weaken her own hold, yet conscious all the while that these theories of her children were scarcely less subversive of her own supremacy than those of any heretic or atheist, the Church burnt one Mystic and canonized another, with an impartiality born of vacillation. The influence of the Mystics was indeed immense, and too serious to be lightly regarded. They promised to destroy the prison, the canker, the disease of Self—to let the freed soul loose from the body, to vanish for ever in the Divine darkness of the unimaginable Abyss; they made the comfort of many a dreaming soul, tortured by the ineradicable memory of human sin. They offered to the tired thinker, the starved and weary labourer, the broken nun, the harassed townspeople, an attraction which the Church herself dared not openly afford; and many who had wandered away from the hard-and-fast, strict-and-narrow fold of Rome, found a refuge in Mysticism, who might else have thrown aside all claim to faith. Even as to-day, many are Spiritualists who otherwise would certainly be Agnostics. For Spiritualism insists on none of the bonds or dogmas of religion, and offers a palpable proof to its believers of that which religion only promises; that is to say, the Immortality of the Soul, that golden mirage-fountain of our thirsty modern world. This was precisely the position of mediæval Mysticism, only, as we know, it was Rest, not Life, that she offered; extinction, and not continuance; not Paradise, but the Abyss.

V.

That a great many people everywhere at one time ardently desire one thing is certainly no proof that their desire shall be satisfied; but it shows a real want in the heart of man—a want which may be stopped by altered conditions, if not by the actual things desired. As many people longed for extinction in the harassed Middle Ages as pine for immortality to-day. I do not mean to say they formulated this desire, for most of them were fervent Christians. But life was bitter then, and they hoped to extinguish their weary and craving souls in the unconscious Godhead. When life is bitter now, we say “Eternal Justice owes us a happier experience to discharge our sufferings here.” But in both attitudes the same one fact remains, that so long as life is bitter, men will crave and will complain. No modern preacher has spoken more fervently of the joys of immortality than these medieval Mystics spoke of the Abyss. Each to each has been the final and immeasurable recompense for all the wrongs that ever there were in the world. By many ardent Churchmen, and many saints, and many thinkers in the Middle Ages, God was chiefly worshipped as the Abyss. He was the Supreme Annihilation. The soul must plunge, says Eckhart, into pure Nothingness. The soul must sink, says Tauler, in the Divine Darkness, into the secret place of the Divine Abyss. “There is no safety,” says Guillame Briçonnet, “save in the Abyss” (“l’abysme qui abysme en désabysmant”). Adventitious reward, says Suso, may come in the consciousness of having conquered evil and done good; but true reward, essential reward, is only in the wild waste and deep abyss of inscrutable Deity, in the union of the soul with sheer impersonal Godhead. This Godhead, says Eckhart, is a simple stillness without quality or distinction. God is neither this nor that. Who can distinguish and say, “This is good, sees not God; for all that is in the Godhead is absolutely one, and formless, and void, and interminable, and passive.” And the names under which God is chiefly worshipped show this strange impersonal attitude. The Divine Dark, the Obscure Night, the Desert, the Abyss, the Unimaged Nakedness, the Infinite Essence, the Hidden Darkness, the One, the Supreme Nothing: these are the names of this remote, abstract Jehovah of the mediæval Mystics.

VI.

To lose themselves in this unconscious beatitude[beatitude] was the religious ideal of a thousand souls. To lose themselves, to drown, extinguish, break through and beyond the hateful imprisoning Ego—this was the motive of their mood. But what, we may ask, remains of a man after he has lost himself so utterly? How can he distinguish the bliss of which he dreams? How can he even know he is resting? We are suspicious that these Mystics did not quite realize their own desires, that they meant some residue of themselves to remain and enjoy the sensation of their own Nirvana. And so we ask of them what they mean by the Abyss. “Thereof,” says Eckhart, “we cannot speak. It is the simplest essence of existence, it is unknown, and must ever be unknown. It is the simple darkness of the silent waste. It is the utmost term.”

But yet we are unsatisfied and persist in questioning. How can the spirit of man, deprived of virtue, cognition, will, personality and life, remain immortal? Still more, how can he enjoy such immortality? The dim feeling of such eternal rest we all can understand, who have gone suddenly from a lighted room into the vast night, and have felt our souls suddenly invaded and possessed by a sense of mystery and silence. We have felt this; but in his final beatitude the Mystic must not feel: “He must be as one dead.” We also can understand the dizzy rapture of unwinding abstraction from abstraction, till we weave a net that seems to hold the heaven and all its stars. But the Mystic may not think. “He must see neither distinction nor difference.” And the passionate upward spring of the soul towards a God, unseen, unknown, in which it still believes; thus might we pray. But the Mystic does not pray. “So long as a man desires to do the will of God, so long he is not truly fit; he who may seek the Godhead, he neither wills, nor knows, nor cares.”

What then, we ask again, what is the satisfaction that draws your souls so firmly towards the Abyss? Will no one answer? And Tauler, the great Mystical Dominican, replies, “There remains to a man, the fathomless annihilation of himself; and an absolute ignoring of his personal self—of all aims, of all will, heart, purpose, use, or way.”

VII.

It is not, then, a personal delight that awaits the Mystic in the abyss; it is the sense of absorption in his Deity. It is hard to define the character of this Godhead for which the man so gladly lays down his soul and his life. Since it is identical with the foundation of the soul (and this, Eckhart assures us, is not only Divine and simple, but an Utter Nothingness), it is difficult to lay hold of the idea of its divinity—or indeed of its difference from created matter which is also purum Nihil, and it is easy to see how, by this path of negation, Mysticism always diverges into Pantheism.... The essence of the Mystical Divinity appears to be its very incomprehensibility; and it would be rash and vain indeed to form an idea thereof. But we may at least attempt to understand what that divinity appeared to its worshippers.

“The One,” begins Plotinus, “is neither substance, nor quality, nor reason, nor soul, neither moving, nor at rest, not in place and not in time; neither is it of any sort or kind.” Thus we learn what things were not intrinsic to the Deity; we learn that we must conceive a bodiless, unqualified, impersonal, interminable Void; an eternal, undifferentiate essence of existence; an infinite Being not to be approached by reason or by soul. Eckhart goes a step further, and affirms not only what the Godhead is not, but even what it is. “There is a Godhead,” he says, “above God. The Godhead neither moves nor works.... It is a simple Stillness, an eternal Silence.”

If this were all we might comprehend the longing for quiet, the passionate desire for rest which made the wearied and the trouble-harried of all times deify silence and repose. Mysticism has ever flourished best in starved or stormy ages. It is the shrinking of the soul from a perplexed and hideous outer life; it is in some the desire for love and peace, in some the desire for rest, in some for immortality elsewhere. But in logical and speculative minds it is more than this; the God of the Speculative Mystics is not merely Sleep, not merely Dreams, not merely Stillness. They carry their reasoning fearlessly to its natural conclusion, and this is worthy of all praise in them; but that they should worship that conclusion is surely strange—for “God is non-being,” writes Scotus Erigena; and, Eckhart adds that when the soul penetrates the pure uncreate essence of the Godhead, then Nothingness is at last in the presence of Nothingness.

VIII.

God, then, is Nothing; Erigena has given us the phrase, for Nihilum, he says, is the infinite essence of God. The soul is Nothing; “a fathomless annihilation of self,” in Tauler’s words, “an utter nothingness,” in Eckhart’s sentence. And, lastly, the world is nothing, purum Nihil, and as unreal as the rest. Already, in the close of the twelfth century, David of Dinant had declared that Everything is at the same time Spirit, Matter, and God. The later Mystics added a new line to his Thesis: All is One and All is Nothing.

Such is the result of this strange Idealism, which sacrifices from first to last the idea of personality to the conception of God. These are the dogma of this singular phase of thought and feeling; a phase which unites all that is cold and formal in philosophy with all that is unreasoning, perfervid, and hysterical in a Religious Revival. The doctors and preachers of Speculative Mysticism, have trances no less real than those of Saint Francis; but what they contemplate with rapture is not the idea of Infinite Love. It is Infinite Nothing which fills them with ecstasy. And these Mystical thinkers are as precise and as liable to become the mere pedants of a system, as any follower of Kant or Comte. And yet, though they seek to use only their reason, they despise reason. These philosophers look upon reason as the humble handmaiden of ecstasy. And that divine ecstasy is excited by the thought of a Nihilum.

This indeed appears almost an absurd position; and yet the position of the Mystics was honourable and intelligent. They attempted to answer questions which even to-day the theologians elude (see Newman, “Grammar of Assent,” p. 210). “Whence comes Evil?” Evil, they reply, is not created by God, but, so to speak, the blanks and spaces not filled up by His creation. Evil and pain have no Real Existence; they are but a deficiency of vitality; they are negative and temporary qualities unrecognized by an unconscious God innocent of inflicting them. “Why are we created responsible beings without our own consent?” Our bodies are not created by God and we are not responsible to Him for their errors. They are the expressions of our Eternal souls—their own expressions at their own desire as a modus vivendi in the world. “How can God need our action if He is omnipotent? If omnipotent, how tolerant of Evil? If permitting suffering, sin, and Hell, how then All-loving? If All-loving, how Just?” These questions are all answered by the mystical conception of God as a Divine Passivity, an unconscious Fund of Existence. All that is impossible and absurd in the theories of the Mystics is caused by adapting them to religious ideas. They had to explain the immortality of the soul, ... and they spoke of eternal absorption into an Infinite Nothing. They had to explain a good and omnipotent God creating an evil and impotent humanity. They made the one nothing and the other nothing.

The Schism.

In the year 1377 the Pope was at Avignon. Seventy years ago a Pope had come there, as the guest of the Count of Provence, in order to arrange with the King of France the iniquitous extermination of the Templars. He had come to Avignon in the hour of Papal triumph; for in the tragic ruin of the Hohenstaufens, the prestige of the empire was destroyed at last. But in reality this fatal victory had left the Pope no longer the arbiter between France and Germany, but the dependent of the sole surviving Power. The attraction of successful France drew the Pope from Rome to Avignon.

At Rome the Pope had left his Vatican, his authority, his tradition. At Avignon, a chance guest, hastily lodged in the Dominican monastery, he was little better than the Political Agent of Philippe-le-Bel. Yet he showed no hurry to return. Clement was a Frenchman of the South, a Gascon, at home in Provence but cruelly expatriated among the dissensions, the enthusiasms, the treacheries of foreign Italy. Year after year found him still at Avignon, and there he died in the year 1315. His successor, John XXI. or XXII., was another Gascon; and Benedict XII. (1334-1342) and Clement VI. (1342-1352) were Frenchmen also. They built a mighty palace at Avignon, immense, with huge square towers, and walls—four metres thick—scarce broken by the rare small pointed windows rearing their colossal strength high into the air. The great golden-brown palace was less of a palace than a prison, less of a cloister than a castle. It was, in fact, a baron’s fortress of the feudal age; for the Pope had almost forgotten that he was Pope of Rome; he was the Count of Venaissin and Avignon.

He was rich; he was a great lord; he lived luxuriously within those frowning gates. His rooms were full of money-brokers, weighing and counting out their heaps of gold; and there arose no Christ to drive them from the Temple. France, England, Germany, Italy, groaned in vain beneath the exactions of the unscrupulous financial ability that furnished the Court of Avignon with its soft living, its delicate manners, its attention to the Arts. In the beautiful house upon whose walls Simone Memmi had painted a host of his sweet and melancholy angels, men forgot the trumpet clang of the name of Hildebrand; and when the officers of Clement VI. dared to remonstrate with him upon the Oriental magnificence of his palace, deprecating an expenditure beyond that of any of his predecessors—“None of my predecessors knew how to be a Pope,” replied the Count of Venaissin. The Papal ideal had changed.

Yet it would be wrong to regard the Popes at Avignon as Oriental satraps dreaming away, among enchanted reveries, a life of luxury. They were above all things French and very French; active, keen, humane, with a genius for prosperity, a natural quickness for organization. They had a practical piety, of which they made a good income, not without an honest expenditure of pains. Their missions were established in Egypt, India, China, Nubia, Abyssinia, Barbary, and Morocco. Yet, though so eager to convert the heathen, they kept no rancour in their hearts against the unconverted. Cruel they were sometimes, for their age was cruel, but often they were amazingly humane. John XXII. launched Bull after Bull in defence of the unhappy Jews, massacred by Christian greed, and the perverted pity of Christian superstition. “As Jews they are Jews, as men they are men,” said the Pope. “Abhor their doctrines, respect their lives and their wealth.” And Clement VI., when France and Germany tortured and expelled the abominated nation, threw open wide the gates of Avignon, and at the knees of the Vicar of Christ, he made a momentary sanctuary for the Wandering Jew.

Clement was followed by Innocent VI., another Frenchman, equally content with Avignon. When he died it was nearly sixty years since any Pope had trodden the holy stones of Rome. But his successor, Urban V., for all his Gallic blood, revolted against the position of St. Peter as chaplain to the King of France. He saw that the Church lands in Italy were slipping continually from the Pope’s control, while Papal vicars established themselves as hereditary masters of their fiefs, and city after city declared itself with impunity no longer the vassal of St. Peter, but a free Republic.

In Germany the doctrines of Marsiglio and Occam had enduringly ruined the prestige of the Pope. For they declared the Bishop of Rome a simple bishop, subject to the law, subject to the Council, subject to deposition at the hands of the faithful; his thunders were pronounced illegitimate and harmless since no priest, but only a Council General, could excommunicate or even interdict a nation or a king. In Germany the Reformation had begun, as it was to continue, upon the lines of theory and dogma; in England it was already a political revolt, a declaration of national independence. In 1365 England refused to pay the tribute of 1,000 marks which John had promised to the Pope as to his lawful suzerain. England at that moment was triumphant. Ten years ago the battle of Poictiers had secured her hold on France. The French king had died a captive in the Savoy in London, and Europe was not yet aware that the new king of France was Charles the Wise.

At that moment, indeed, France, in reality so near the top of the wheel of fortune, appeared at her lowest. Nations and men forget how quick that wheel revolves; and the Pope, beholding France his sole protector against the world, and France the prey of England, felt himself no longer safe at Avignon. In 1361 a company of freebooters had defeated the Papal troops at the very gates of the Papal city; the Pope had bought them off with a ransom, and had redoubled the fortifications. But he had realized his insecurity. It was evident that the real interests of the Church demanded the return of the Pope to Rome.

Urban made a courageous, a heroic effort. He dragged his reluctant Court of luxurious French Cardinals across the seas to Rome. But in that black and savage haunt of robbers, the Pope remembered Avignon too well. He came home at Christmas time in 1379; but it was only to die in the beautiful familiar palace; and, out of France, the faithful called his death the judgment of the Lord upon him who looks back from the plough.

A brighter epoch opened for his successor, Gregory XI. The genius of King Charles and his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou and Burgundy, had restored the fortunes of France; and Anjou, at any rate, was aware of the advantage which the House of France might reap from the partnership of a Pope at Avignon. For the Pope, of course, was a Frenchman and willing to assist in the triumph of his country, a triumph he could best assist by remaining at Avignon to further and inspire the policy of his king. Every tie, indeed, united to detain Gregory in Provence. He was no ascetic, indifferent to glory or to comfort; but an affectionate, natural man, loving his ease, loving his family, loving the land where he was born. At Avignon he dwelt among his friends, his kinsmen, his father the Comte de Beaufort, his mother, his four sisters. The stories of his Cardinals could only add to his own horror of that distant Italy whose language he could not speak. He was ill, and he dreaded the miasma of Rome; he needed the comforts of that Court whose luxurious memory should long survive in France. “You should have come to Europe a few years ago, before the Schism,” writes the anonymous author of Maître Jehan de Meun—

“N’a pas longtemps mourût Gregoire

Je te dis que toute la gloire

Du plus hault seigneur terrien

Vers son estat n’estoit plus rien.

Là ne falloit ne pompe ne mise

Que herault sceult à devise,

Richesse du tout surmontant

Tout prince que lors fut vivant.”[^[5]]

Yet it was Gregory the Eleventh who was to restore the Papacy to Rome.

It was no longer so easy to return as it had been in the days of Urban. That Pope had not removed to Rome until the energy of Gil Albornoz had reduced the princes of Italy into submission. But now Albornoz was dead, and Italy was more than ever tumultuous and discordant, for the French Governors whom Urban had left behind him had filled the Papal states with horror of the French Pope. Petrarch also was dead, whose pen no less than the sword of Albornoz had been a potent instrument for the return of Urban. The times were changed, and Italy, who had mourned so long the Papal tiara fallen from her forehead, was no longer willing to receive it. After seventy years of exile the Papacy had become a foreign power, and by many of the Italian princes the restoration of Gregory seemed little less than a French invasion. Of all the Papal states only Orvieto, Ancona, Cesano, and Jesi remained true to him. Florence, of old so faithful to the Church, was now united against her with the Ghibelline Viscontis of Milan; and the Arch-Guelf clasped with a mailed hand her new crimson banner written in golden letters with the one word Libertas.

The Italians seemed as capable of shaking off the Pope as they had been capable of shaking off the Emperor. Only a few voices still lamented the exile of St. Peter. Gregory knew very well that the return to Rome meant strife and bitterness, and that he must re-enter his dominions bringing in his hand not peace, but a sword. This prospect inspired him with disgust and fatigue; while every principle of habit, affection, patriotism, loyalty, and selfish interest conspired to keep him in Avignon. All this in one scale; but there lay in the other the conscience of the Pope and the voice that inspired that conscience. It was the voice of a young Italian nun. Europe, distracted with wars, perplexed, unguided, heard at last one voice that proclaimed the will of God, and acknowledged her conscience in St. Catherine of Siena.

The letters of St. Catherine came frequently to Avignon, and with them came other letters from the French Governors telling of the increasing difficulty of keeping together the little that was left of the patrimony of St. Peter. Gregory became visibly disturbed. His conscience urged him to return to Rome. In July the Duke of Anjou[^[6]] came to Avignon to dissuade the Pope from an enterprise so disastrous, as he believed, to the future of France. Of all the royal princes Anjou was the one specially concerned with Italian policy. He was a man handsome, impressive, with a breadth of view and a force of ambition that made him many followers. This son of St. Louis could not fail to influence the Pope. He made it harder to go from Avignon; but the persuading voice of Catherine would not be stilled. The Pope was ill and afraid, a timid man; his sisters and his parents clung to him, entreating him to stay; his Cardinals opposed him; his king commanded: yet on the 13th of September he quitted Avignon. Evil omens added to the discouragement of his spirit; his horse stumbled under him at starting, and fearful tempests delayed him on the sea. But on January 17, 1377, the Pope re-entered Rome.

The seventy years which had made the beauty of Avignon had ruined Rome. No longer the pilgrims brought her the custom of foreign countries; the Court of the Vatican no longer gave an impetus to trade; the prestige of the Pope had ceased to make of Rome the centre of Europe; and the deserted city had realized her intrinsic poverty. Thirty years ago Rienzi had proclaimed her a cave of robbers rather than the abode of decent men. The churches were in ruins,[^[7]] many of them wholly roofless; and in St. Peter’s and the Lateran the flocks nibbled the grass of the pavement up to the steps of the altar. Row after row of ruined dwelling-places gave way to wild fields and heaths—scars of desolation upon the depopulated enclosure of Aurelian. If mediæval Rome lay in ruins, the Rome of antiquity was yet more ruthlessly destroyed, and the temples and theatres of the pagans were used as a quarry or a limekiln by their savage and impoverished successors. For with prosperity, peace and order had deserted Rome. The fierce clans of Colonna and Orsini terrorized the starved and fever-stricken populace; and there was no law beyond their tyranny. Murder was frequent, vendetta an honoured custom, and the Eternal City the shambles of unpunished bloodshedding.

In such a place decency, quiet, or even safety were naturally strangers. The Cardinals, unwilling martyrs, mourned day and night for Avignon. The Pope himself became disenchanted, ungentle, and embittered. But he was resolved not to quit this odious Italy until the patrimony of St. Peter was regained. Albornoz was dead, it is true; but in the Cardinal of the Twelve Apostles the Pope found a spirit no less militant, resolute and cruel to lead his armies against the revolted cities and to re-establish in Italy the vanished prestige of Rome.

Robert of Geneva, Cardinal of the Twelve Apostles, was, like the Pope himself, a Frenchman of good family and aristocratic prejudice. His father was the Count of Geneva, his mother Mahault of Auvergne and Boulogne. In his eyes the revolt of subjects was a crime beyond excuse; and when, as in the present case, there was added to the denial of the divine right of sovereigns a heretic apostasy from the dominion of the Church, his indignation dried the founts of pity in his heart. The history of his whole life proves the Cardinal to be not naturally cruel, nor even vindictive; but his campaign in Italy was terrible. With the Frenchman’s distrust of the Italians, Robert refused to engage Italian condottieri; he knew that these companies, changing masters continually, were gentle to the enemy of the moment, the brother-in-arms of yesterday and to-morrow. The Cardinal, fiercely in earnest, engaged the Breton Jehan de Malestroit who had cried, “Where the sun can enter, I can enter!” and the Englishman, Sir John Hawkwood, with his White Company the most terrible of the day. Supported by these pitiless auxiliaries, Robert of Geneva quenched in blood the fierce resistance of Florence, Bologna, Cesena, Faenza, and other rebellious cities. Massacre after massacre, sack and pillage innumerable marked his progress; but the voice of the Churchman was never heard to cry for mercy. He had no admiration for the obstinate courage of the besieged; they were rebels, and beyond pity. “I will wash my hands in their blood!” he cried at Bologna and at Cesena there were 5,000 slain. These things made the name of the young Cardinal an abomination in Italy. But they secured in one campaign the submission of the Italians.

The laurels of Robert of Geneva still were green when, on March 27, 1378, Gregory the Eleventh died at Anagni. The Pope had been on the point of returning to Avignon; and the necessity of their prolonged residence in savage Rome, and the fact that the Conclave must be held there, fell with the weight of misfortune upon the impatient Cardinals.

It was the first Conclave that had been held in Rome for fifty-seven years, and the Roman populace clamoured in the streets for a Roman Pope. But among the sixteen Cardinals of the Conclave, eleven were French. They might easily have carried the necessary majority of two-thirds had they been of one mind among themselves; but the hatred of North and South did not merely divide the French from the Italians; it divided the Frenchmen among themselves. Gregory and Clement had both been Limousins, and the majority of the French Cardinals decided to continue this tradition. The remnant, however—the Gallicans, as they called themselves—preferred even an Italian to a Limousin; and their spokesman, Robert of Geneva, made overtures to the Trans-Alpines. The result was the election of a man of no party, a man who was not even a Cardinal. Bartolommeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, was an Italian; but he was something more than an Italian; he was a Neapolitan, a subject of Queen Giovanna, and therefore presumably in favour of the French. He had lived at Avignon, and was familiar with French customs and French policy. It was hoped that he might prove a bond of union. Scarcely was his election accomplished, in haste, amid the noises of the shouting mob outside, when the impatient Romans burst into the Conclave, clamouring for a Roman Pope. The Cardinals dared not confess their choice of a Neapolitan, and in their terror they lied, imposing on the people the Cardinal of St. Peter’s, a Roman born. This fraud, together with the constraint put on the Conclave by the violence of the mob, were a few months later alleged against the validity of the election of Prignano.

But at first no conscience was troubled by this irregularity. For six months the Archbishop of Bari wore an undisputed tiara, and Urban VI. succeeded quietly to Gregory. Urban was zealous for reform, passionately determined against simony, pure in his life, energetic, resolute; but virtue has seldom been manifest in so unlovable an Avatar. The man was a Neapolitan peasant: short, squat, coarse, and savage. He flung rude words and violent speeches like mud in the faces of his elegant French Cardinals. “Fool!” “Blockhead!” “Simoniacal Pharisee!”—such were the hard nails with which he studded the ever unpalatable word Reform; and one day, had not Robert of Geneva caught the holy father by the sleeve, he would have struck a Cardinal in the assembled Consistory.

Robert of Geneva was thirty-six years old; he was tall, commanding, with a handsome face and fine manners. His aristocratic urbanity veiled a nature that did not scorn to do and dare. There could be no greater contrast to the Pope than he, and he became the idol of the Cardinals, although, in fact, he, the Arch-Gallican, was the distant cause of the election of Urban. His reputation for ferocity in battle added a prestige to his pleasant courtliness: it was he who should have been the Pope! He would not have kept the College, throughout the sweltering summer, in Rome where the detested Urban declared that he would live and die. Something must be done, and at once, for Urban threatened to create a majority of Italian Cardinals. One by one the Cardinals left Rome for their health. Their resort was first Anagni, thence they went to Fondi. It was an open secret in Rome wherefore they found the air so good there. Urban got wind of their conferences, and on the 18th of September he created twenty-eight Italian cardinals. Two days later there was a great ceremony in the church at Fondi. The French Cardinals announced to the world that at last a legitimate Pope had been elected in succession to Gregory. He was, of course, a Frenchman; he was Robert of Geneva; he was Clement VII., the first Antipope of the great Schism.

The Church was terribly divided by this news—Clement, elected by all the French, was not repudiated by the Italian Cardinals, who, playing the waiting game of their nation, remained neutral. Yet the contest was a contest not of persons, but of nationalities. “The significance of Urban’s election lay in the fact that it restored the Papacy to Rome, and freed it from the influence of France.”[^[8]] Catharine of Siena clearly perceived this significance, and wrote of Clement, who was to undo her sacred mission, as “a devil in the shape of man.” In the North of Italy the campaign of Clement in the previous year persuaded the decimated cities of the truth of this opinion; but the South was not firm for Urban, and Naples openly declared herself the champion of his rival. The confusion was not only in Italy. The Church everywhere was shaken to its foundations. In many bishoprics there were two bishops;[^[9]] there was a terrible doubt in the minds of the Faithful, for of the two Popes, one must be Antichrist, his followers heretics, and consigned to eternal damnation. It is not too much to say that the authority of the Church never recovered from this long and terrible questioning. The minds of the pious turned from the Church to God; Mysticism and heresy consoled the uncertain; and false prophets were common in the land.

Confusion in the Church was echoed by confusion in the State. England, because of the war with France, was passionate for Urban. The Empire also was for Urban; and Brittany, and all whose hand was against the French. “France desires not merely the Papacy, but the universal monarchy of the globe,” wrote Urban to the Emperor.[^[10]] But among the smaller states France had still her supporters; Scotland, Savoy, Naples, Leon, and Castile followed in her wake, and declared for Clement. There was great joy in France. Louis of Anjou, perhaps the first of European princes to send in his adhesion to the Antipope, was consoled for the departure of Gregory; and when the news was brought to the king, he exclaimed, “I am Pope at last!” But the joy was the joy of princes, not the joy of the people. The nation mourned the confusion that had fallen on the Church, and the University of Paris wrapped itself in a melancholy neutrality.

[5]. Paris: Bib. Nat. Français[Français], 811; No. 7203; “L’Apparicion de Jehan de Meun.”

[6]. July 17, 1376.

[7]. Pastor, “Geschichte der Päpste,” i. 63, after Gregorovius.

[8]. Creighton, “History of the Papacy,” vol. i. p. 64.

[9]. Especially in Germany—Mayence, Breslau, Constance, Metz, Loire, Breslau, Lübeck, &c. See Pastor., op. cit., book ii. p. 108, et seq.

[10]. Sept. 6, 1382. Vide Pastor., p. 108.

Valentine Visconti.

I.

Valentine Visconti, greater than Helen as the cause of battles, was born in the Abbey of Pavia, in the year 1366. Her grandfather, Galeazzo Visconti, had left Milan rather suddenly, being ill with gout and “temendo la severità” of one so skilled in the use of succession-powders as Bernabò his brother, co-tyrant with him of Lombardy. He had designed a safe and splendid castle for himself in Pavia. While it was still unfinished Valentine was born in the hospitable old Certosa there.[^[11]]

Galeazzo Visconti had taken with him from Milan his wife, Blanche of Savoy, his little daughter Iolanthe, and his married son Giangaleazzo, with his wife Isabelle. These last were the parents of Valentine. When she was born her mother was sixteen and her father fifteen years of age.[^[12]] At her nativity there were, we are told, incredible rejoicings; for the pride of Galeazzo Visconti was gratified by the birth of a grandchild who was no less the grand-daughter of a King of France.

The mother of Valentine was that little French princess who, six years ago, had been sold into Lombardy to help to raise the golden millions of her father’s ransom. John the Good had received for his daughter the sum of five hundred thousand golden florins, a sort of inverse marriage portion, the price of a royal alliance. But Galeazzo had not paid for barren honour only: Isabelle had brought her husband the county and the title of Vertus in Champagne. Though the little girl had gone weeping into Italy, her tears were soon dried. She had left a devastated and ruined country; she came into a land of sumptuous tyranny, of riches and magnificence. Life was easy at Milan and at Pavia, where Galeazzo was busied with his new university, where Giangaleazzo—a timid, intellectual, orderly creature—spent day after day in his study full of enormous parchment ledgers, directing the staff of secretaries who copied into them his accounts, his memoranda, and duplicates of his correspondence. Priests and friars from the old Certosa, professors of law and learning from the new college, poets also—the English poet, Master Geoffrey Chaucer, and the prince of poets himself, Messer Francesco Petrarca,—learned men like Philippe de Mézières, visitors from so far away as England, France, or Cyprus—these were the guests of the palace. Gradually the stately home echoed with children’s voices. Valentine was born in 1366. One brother grew strong and playful at her side; another died in babyhood. When the third was born, in 1373, Isabelle died, and a few months afterwards her baby followed her.

The immense castle of Pavia was very quiet now. Iolanthe, the girl-widow of the Duke of Clarence, had married, in 1372, the Marquis of Monferrat. There were only the old Visconti and his wife, and the studious young Count of Vertus and his two little children. It was quieter still when, in 1378, Galeazzo Visconti died. He had been a terrible old man: cruel, unscrupulous, scholarly. It was he who obtained from the Emperor, Charles IV., in 1361, the privilege to found the University of Pavia, and he who protected it by an edict threatening with heavy punishments the Milanese who dared to study in another school. And he it was, also, who threw alive into a fiery furnace two priests who came to him on an unwelcome message; and he who, with his brother Bernabò, had poisoned a third brother, co-heir and co-tyrant with them in Lombardy. They had divided his share, Galeazzo taking Piacenza, Pavia, the west to Novara, and as far as Como in the north; while Bernabò possessed the rich province of the east. Both ruled alike in Milan. Both should have been equally powerful. But Galeazzo had left all his share to the sole Count of Vertus, and he, too, had only one son to follow him, whereas the signory of Bernabò was strengthened and divided by eleven turbulent and violent young sons.

Valentine’s father remembered the fate of his uncle. He kept very quiet, surrounded himself with priests and guards, ate of no dish before a score of stewards tasted of it, and dissimulated his ambition. This he did so well that the timid Count of Vertus became a by-word and a laughing-stock in the house of Bernabò. Although the young man had taken care to obtain from the Emperor investitures which conferred upon him absolute authority;[^[13]] although by his judicious protection of the people he made himself the desired deliverer of the unhappy Milanese, still Bernabò and his children could not take their kinsman seriously. And the better to lull their suspicions, in 1380 the young Count of Vertus came a-courting to the noisy Castello di Porta Giovio, where Bernabò kept house with such of his nine-and-twenty children as still remained in Milan. It was a great riotous house full of voices, full of splendid young men in armour (Palamedes, Lancilotto, Sagramoro), full of beautiful women and fair young girls with lovely names (Achiletta, Verde, Damigella), and not less radiant for their easy familiarity with evil. One of these dangerous maidens, Caterina, the Count of Vertus took to be his second wife. In the next year, in 1381, on the 4th of October, his boy, Astorre, died.

Valentine was now his only heir, for during the first eight years of their marriage Caterina Visconti had no children. Valentine was fifteen years old, of an age to be dowered and married. Her father, however, kept her at home with him, teaching her many things—too much, some people said, for they thought her as wise as Medea. She could invent posies; she could read not only Italian books, but Latin, French, and German. Into whatever court she might hereafter marry, she would be not only the daughter of the Duke of Milan, but his diplomatic agent. I do not know if she could speak English, but in those years of warfare the English were often at Milan, and Valentine when a little girl had seen (a brilliant, sudden vision) her English uncle of Clarence, who had died so strangely at Alba, and was buried at Pavia. She was a scholarly maiden, possessing of her own no less than eleven books; more than her grandfather, King John, had ever owned in his royal library at Paris. And she could write as well as read—a clear, excellent hand, of which the signature still exists in the Paris archives. Froissart in later days remarked on the frequent letters that she wrote to her father: “Madame Valentine wrote him all she knew.”

I do not know if Valentine was beautiful. A line in “Le Pastouralet” speaks of her as

“Maret, qui le miex dasoit,”

and mentions the courtesy of “la touse mignotte”—the dainty dame. This conveys an impression of nothing more positive than elegance and grace. We can fill up the frame with a couple of portraits which still exists in the Bibliothèque Nationale: small grisaille illuminations adorning a manuscript poem[^[14]] in defence of Valentine. There is nothing very distinctive in either portrait—no accent of striking personality or resemblance. They represent the same young and slender woman, rather tall, with a long neck and slim arms, and a bust both full and delicate. The head is small, the hair parted from ear to ear across the middle of the head, the back locks being tied in a Greek knot, the front ones divided again in the middle and looped in pendant braids above the ear. Under this severe coiffure we discern a serious gentle placid face—long narrow eyes, a high forehead, a full mouth with pretty pursed lips; a face too closely following the mediæval ideal for it to impress us very strongly as a likeness. Valentine is clothed in a low-cut, tight gown girdled round the hips, with long, tight sleeves descending to the knuckles of the slim and delicate hands—over this she wears a very ample trained surtout, also low in the neck, falling in rich folds to her feet and buttoned down the front to the hips, where it is sewn together, but split up at the arms in immense wide sleeve-holes, a yard long, revealing the under dress. If the young duchess was not precisely beautiful, yet certainly she was beautifully attired. The catalogue of her gala-dresses is a thing to wonder on: scarlet, and silver, and cloth of gold, and rich embroidery; cloths of peacock-green and mulberry colour; tissues of netted pearls. And she had as many pearls, diamonds, sapphires, and balass-rubies as any princess in a fairy-story. She wore them sewn all over her caps, round her girdles, encircling her young throat, and showered broadcast across the brocades and embroidery of her gowns. With all this, at sixteen, and with the subtle sweetness of the natural Lombard grace, it is not necessary to be beautiful.

II.

In 1382 certain guests came to Milan, who marvelled at the magnificence of these Viscontis, who talked much with Valentine’s father, and who spread abroad the tale of his daughter’s wisdom and her splendour. They must also have impressed on the mind of this young girl the strength, the beauty, and the wealth of France. And they must no less have spurred the silent and vigilant ambition of her father; for in the late May of 1382, along the roads of Lombardy, four thousand men rode together to be the guests of Milan. They were all mounted on beautiful chargers caparisoned in silk and precious metals; they were all clad in suits of burnished armour; light aigrettes floated from their helmets. “They seemed the army of Xerxes,” wrote the Monk of St. Denis; “their beasts of burden went slowly under loads of gold and treasure. Those that beheld them, astrologers and prophets, read in the future the records of their fabulous glory.” In truth, they were a host of heroes. Knights like the Count of Savoy and the Count of Polenza went in the ranks. At their head rode a tall, square-shouldered man, with fair locks beginning to grizzle, and a handsome countenance. He was magnificent in his cloak of woven gold and lilies. This was Louis of Anjou, King of Sicily, setting out for Naples to conquer his new kingdom.

A kingdom in Italy! It was the dearest vision of the age. The kingdom of Adria, a dream never realized; the kingdom of Naples, a phantom eluding for two hundred years the eager grasp of France. In the subtle mind of Giangaleazzo Visconti, a third, a vaster kingdom, was already taking shape—a kingdom dead and buried for near five hundred years—the kingdom of Italy!

But to gain Italy it was necessary to be secure in Milan. While his guests rode on triumphantly to famine and disaster, the Count of Vertus elaborated his plan. When the King of Sicily, wrapped in a remnant of homespun daubed with painted yellow lilies, lay dead in his unconquered kingdom, defeated in his grave at Bari, Giangaleazzo Visconti ruled supreme in Lombardy.

He had plotted so well that one sole death secured this change. On the 6th of May, 1385, Giangaleazzo, apparently en route for the shrine of our Lady of Varese, passed by the gates of Milan. His uncle and his cousins went out to meet him, smiling at the immense guard which ever attended the timid Hermit of Pavia. But now Giangaleazzo dropped the mask. In an hour Milan was his, his cousins his prisoners, and his uncle, with his dilettissima amante, fast in the Castle of Trezzo. Giangaleazzo, no less skilled in poisons than his father, had him poisoned there, and buried him in Milan in a sepulchre of splendid marble. But he showed no wanton cruelty. His cousins escaped, destitute indeed, but unharmed. No unnecessary pain attended the murder of the tyrant Bernabò, decently executed by a well-cooked dish of vegetables. Ambition, not revenge, nor the blood-mania of his race, was the master passion of the new Lord of Lombardy. If any questioned his proceedings, he could produce the investiture of Wenzel, granting him absolute authority and final judgment. The children of Bernabò were stupefied and did not rebel; most of the sons went to fight in the ranks of Sir John Hawkwood; and the people of Milan hailed the Count of Vertus as a deliverer. He taxed them heavily, indeed, but without disorder; and his police were so excellent that he used to smile and say, “I am the only robber in my provinces.” Giangaleazzo was now master of a great domain, immensely rich, three-and-thirty. He meant to go far. In 1386 he sent to Pope Urban, demanding the title of King of Italy.

Urban refused, and in future the Ghibelline Count of Vertus addressed his requests to the Emperor, or else to the Anti-Pope at Avignon, who asked nothing better than to make himself a party in Italy. But first of all, Giangaleazzo began to conquer his kingdom. Verona, Padua, Pisa, Siena, Perugia, Assisi, Bologna, Spoleto, fell like ninepins before his gathering force. Florence began to tremble. Foreign countries began to talk of this new conqueror, of his force, his wealth, his one young daughter. Clement the Pope of Avignon, among others, perceived that with Anjou in the south and Visconti in the north, a great Gallic party might be formed in Italy. Clement was at once the creature and the patron of the kings of France. In the winter of 1386-87, while the Milanese messenger still were in the saddle arranging a marriage between Valentine and the Emperor’s brother, suddenly the Governor of Vertus arrived at Pavia. He brought a message from the King of France, the young Charles VI. The King demanded the hand of Valentine for his only brother, Louis.

This was an important step. The two first children of the King of France had died as soon as they were born, and Louis was still the heir to the Crown. Valentine, six years after her father’s second marriage, was still his only child. It was current in France that the Count of Vertus turned to his daughter and said, “When I see you again, fair daughter, I trust you will be Queen of France.”

III.

This proposal, which came as a surprise to Europe and almost as an outrage to the Emperor, was no surprise to the Lord of Milan. Months before Giangaleazzo had laid his plans. There exists at Paris in the Archives Nationales (K. 554, No. 7) the summary of a Project of Marriage between Louis and Valentine, dated the 26th of August, 1386.

It is interesting to note that in this early draft there is no thought of any possible French claim to Milan. Valentine is dowered with Asti and its revenue—for which her husband was never to be constrained to pay homage; she was also to bring her husband 450,000 golden florins, and to come to him “bien joyellée et aornée de joyaulx.” And, only after the death of her father, she was to succeed to the county of Vertus in Champagne.

This was a great deal, but this was not enough. There was in France a strong party so hostile to the Lord of Milan, that riches, and mere riches, were not enough to overpower their opposition. Visconti desired above all things a Royal alliance. He saw that the Guelf—the national party—in Italy was strong and was unrepresented. He would be Head of the Guelfs, until he secured something better, and his best title to that Headship was a French alliance. Moreover, self-preservation, no less than ambition, rendered the marriage desirable. Isabel of Bavaria, granddaughter of the murdered Bernabò Visconti, was Queen of France. How could Giangaleazzo suffer that his exiled cousins should possess so tremendous an advantage over him? He may have felt himself insecure in his usurped sovereignty, so long as France was united by blood and interest only to the Disinherited. If Valentine married Louis, Milan was safe from France. So at Christmas, 1386, Giangaleazzo offered the husband of Valentine the county of Vertus, in his lifetime as well as after his death, and included in the marriage contract the astounding clause of the succession of Valentine to Milan.

Even without this, Valentine was a very wealthy heiress; she brought back to France her mother’s dowry, the county of Vertus in Champagne. In addition to this she took into the kingdom 450,000 golden florins, a freight of golden ornaments and jewels, furniture to the amount of 70,000 florins, gold and silver plate, and the county of Asti in Lombardy, with a yearly income of nearly 30,000 golden florins.[^[15]]

The county of Asti comprised a whole province of towns, villages, and castles. Thirty signories were in its fief; forty-eight villas paid homage to the Count of Asti; Brie and Cherasco, two large towns in Piedmont, belonged directly to him. In the politics of those times few things are more striking than the singular lightmindedness with which a king of France bestows upon a Lombard adventurer a county in the very heart and centre of his own kingdom; or the confidence with which an Italian conqueror hands the key of his position to a wealthy neighbour. The situation of the French at Asti turned out to have the very gravest political consequences. It assured them Savona, Genoa, Pisa for a moment, and a century of wars about the Milanese. For this secure footing in Lombardy gave a point of reality to their vision of an Italian kingdom, and made the subtraction of Italy from the Empire appear not only desirable but possible. On the other hand, it familiarized Italy with the French. Henceforth the Italian princes, in any dispute among themselves, would call in the protection not only of the King of France but of their French neighbour, the powerful Count of Asti.

But at first the Lombards did not like it. “I Lombardi,” says Corio, “furono di mala voglia.” What they really dreaded was the succession of Valentine and her French husband to Milan. This is too complicated and intricate a question to dispose of here. I will only say that the Italians believed that in some fashion Giangaleazzo had secured Milan to his daughter, in case he should have no sons, or (as actually happened) in case all his sons should die childless. But the question of the French claim to Milan deserves a history to itself.

IV.

In April, 1387, Valentine of Milan was married by proxy and parole to Louis, Duke of Touraine. The bride was twenty-one, the bridegroom just sixteen; but, as Juvenal des Ursins remarked, “Assez caut, subtil et sage de son aage.” But not until the 3rd of June, 1389, did the Lord of Milan send his married daughter to her home in France.

For in France a powerful faction opposed the marriage. The king was little more than a lad; entirely—or, of late, almost entirely—submissive to his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy. When the wise King Charles expired in the autumn of 1380, he left the custody of his two children to this younger brother of his, who in all his battles and adventures had been his right-hand man. But the King left the Regency of the Kingdom to the elder of his brothers, the Duke of Anjou. In every sense the brothers were rivals and antagonists; the interests of Anjou lay to the South, the interests of Burgundy to the North. Anjou was a man of culture, made by nature to be the head of a society of nobles; while Burgundy, the Captain, was the champion of popular rights. In nothing were they at one. When Anjou left the kingdom to conquer Naples, and when the news came to France that he would nevermore return, the supremacy of Burgundy appeared secure. But Anjou had left behind him a successor—not his son, the child-king of Sicily. No, the real successor to his aims and policy was his nephew, the Prince Louis, the younger of the two sons of the dead king.

Little harmony between this lad and his uncle of Burgundy! At ten years old the child fights like a hero at Rosebecque; but the old captain, his tutor, keeps all his smiles for the other nephew, the docile and amiable king. He feels in Louis a spirit of danger, a breath of insubordination. And, in truth, one after the other, the ancient counsellors and servitors of Anjou take shelter in the household of the prince. Burgundy feels that Louis is Anjou Redivivus—he must be kept low. And for this the testament of Charles V. gives ample warrant: for that king, well-named the Wise, feeling that the danger of France lay in the greatness of her princes, had conquered his fatherly heart and decreed that his younger son should have no more than a pension of 12,000 livres a year. But this was not to be. As time went on, and the Regency came to an end, Louis stimulated his placid brother to a sense of independence. And the young king, less Roman than his father, and glad perhaps to feel in the kingdom another power than that of Burgundy, began to enrich his only brother, giving him the counties of Valois and Beaumont, lands in Cotentin, Caen, Champagne, and Brie: then the Duchy of Touraine; the promise of the inheritance of the old Duchess of Orleans; finally, this rich marriage with Valentine Visconti.

Burgundy resisted with might and main. Not only would this marriage make Louis too strong, but of all brides Valentine was the bride least to his mind. For Burgundy had married two of his own children into the House of Bavaria, and had given a Bavarian princess—the vivacious Isabel—as wife to the young king. Now all these Bavarians were the grandchildren of Bernabò, murdered by the father of Valentine. Also the niece of Burgundy, Béatrix d’Armagnac, “la gaie Armagnageoise,” had married in 1382. This Carlo Visconti, Lord of Parma, heir of Bernabò, had been stripped of all his goods by Giangaleazzo and Beatrice, no longer laughing, had returned to eat the bread of exile in her brother’s house. Thus the Queen, and Burgundy, and Armagnac, and Berry (the other brother of the dead king) were bound by every instinct of natural anger and honourable vendetta to look upon Giangaleazzo as the spoiler of their kinsmen—of mother, children, niece, or husband—and in their eyes the riches of Milan were the price of blood. Not one of these but hoped to oust the usurper and restore the rightful line. And so for two years they contrived to defer the marriage.[^[16]]

Meanwhile the influence of Burgundy weakened, that of Prince Louis increased, with the king. In the autumn of 1388 the disastrous “Voyage d’Allemagne” deeply discredited Burgundy, its author. In their tent at Corenzich, far from Queen and Court, the two brothers held long colloquies. Not in vain did Louis plead for his bride. In the summer of 1389, Philippe de Florigny was sent into Lombardy to bring her home.

Valentine took away with her an escort of knights, a burden of gold and gems, the possession of Asti, and the promise of Milan. She had in her caskets three hundred thousand pearls of price, beside the pearls upon her gala-dresses. Her plate was valued at more than one hundred thousand marks Parisis. Her jewels, ornaments, and tapestries were estimated at nearly seven hundred thousand golden florins.[^[17]] Giangaleazzo had found nothing too costly or too radiant for his only daughter. When at last he let her go, he rode with her out of the gates of Pavia, saying never a word of farewell, looking not once into her beloved face, lest he should fall a-weeping. In the saddest hour of her tragic life, Valentine remembered with tears that silent parting.

It was the 17th of August, 1389, according to the dates of the Monk of St. Denis, when Valentine rode into Melun to meet her bridegroom. The King was there as well as all the Court—a Court full of kinsmen for Valentine. The Viscontis counted their alliances with the kings of France back into those mythical ages when Æneas, ancestor of either House, founded the city of Angleria. Valentine found plenty of more recent connections. The King and her husband were both her first cousins, and so was the young King of Sicily; the Dukes of Burgundy and Berry were her uncles. She was also, as I have said, first cousin once removed to the King’s young wife, Isabel of Bavaria. She was cousin also to Madame de Montauban, cousin by marriage to Madame d’Armagnac. But these three kinswomen looked on her with horror, and all her splendour seemed to them unholy spoil fresh from the unclean hands of her father, the triumphant assassin of his kinsmen.

The jealousy and suspicion of the Queen must have been the earliest greeting of Valentine at Melun. Queen Isabel was the idol of the Court. Radiantly beautiful, eighteen years old, she was not satisfied with the devotion of her husband. Charles VI. was a gentle, kind-hearted, stalwart young man, at two-and-twenty already rather bald, clear of eye and cheek, generous, slow-witted, unapt to State and dignity. He was lovable and sweet in temper; “he emitted, like an odoriferous flower, the ingenuity of his perfect character,” writes the anonymous Monk of St. Denis. But at his side, more brilliant and more eloquent than he, rode the first knight of chivalry, the King’s only brother, Louis, Duke of Touraine. This young man was eighteen years old, extremely handsome, so witty and so wise that in the University of Paris there were no doctors who were proof against his bonne memoire et belle loquelle. Often at night, in the Hôtel de Saint Paul at Paris, he and the young Marshal Boucicault would sit into the grey hours of the morning, devising and arguing the nature of the soul, or making rondels, songs, and ballads. Other days and nights were spent in less innocent amusements; for the beautiful Duke of Touraine was so irresistible a lover that popular fancy endowed him with a magic wand and an enchanted ring, making him absolute master of all women. None the less—though in a knight it were more noble to succour than to enslave fair ladies—the Duke was considered (a woman has pronounced it) “the very refuge and retreat of chivalry.” And the charm of his youth and beauty, of his rhetoric and laughter, of his gentle manners and brilliant knightliness, still exhales from the dusty pages of Christine de Pisan and Juvenal des Ursins. These two loved him. But the hostile Monstrelet, the critical Monk of St. Denis, the unenthusiastic Froissart—even these assure us of his enchanting presence.

According to Burcarius the King was handsomer than his young brother; but we must allow for a natural Burgundian hostility to Louis, and a natural Burgundian preference for force and valour, fresh colour, sweet temper, good humour, and all vigorous northern qualities, in preference to the subtler charms of their enemy. The stalwart Fleming thinks the King the finest man at Court, and handsomer than any there, far handsomer than his wife, “jolie et avenante,” indeed, but “basse et brunette”: fatal defects in the eyes of a Fleming! Her indisputable empire over men he ascribes not to her face, but to her lively manners. “Folle et légère,” was she: