La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages Part 2

"They are devils."--Then they must be alive. Failing to make an end of them, men suffer the simple folk to clothe, to disguise them. By the help of legends they come to be baptized, even to be foisted upon the Church. But at least they are converted? Not yet. We catch them stealthily subsisting in their own heathen character.

Where are they? In the desert, on the moor, in the forest? Ay; but, above all, in the house. They are kept up by the most intimate household usages. The wife guards and hides them in her household things, even in her bed. With her they have the best place in the world, better than the temple,--the fireside.

Never was revolution so violent as that of Theodosius. Antiquity shows no trace of such proscription of any wors.h.i.+p. The Persian fire-wors.h.i.+pper might, in the purity of his heroism, have insulted the visible deities, but he let them stand nevertheless. He greatly favoured the Jews, protecting and employing them. Greece, daughter of the light, made merry with the G.o.ds of darkness, the tunbellied Cabiri; but yet she bore with them, adopted them as workmen, even to shaping out of them her own Vulcan. Rome in her majesty welcomed not only Etruria, but even the rural G.o.ds of the old Italian labourer. She persecuted the Druids, but only as the centre of a dangerous national resistance.

Christianity conquering sought and thought to slay the foe. It demolished the schools, by proscribing logic and uprooting the philosophers, whom Valens slaughtered. It razed or emptied the temples, s.h.i.+vered to pieces the symbols. The new legend would have been propitious to the family, had the father not been cancelled in Saint Joseph; had the mother been set up as an educatress, as having morally brought forth Jesus. A fruitful road there was, but abandoned at the very outset through the effort to attain a high but barren purity.

So Christianity turned into that lonely path where the world was going of itself; the path of a celibacy in vain opposed by the laws of the emperors. Down this slope it was hurled headlong by the establishment of monkery.

But in the desert was man alone? The Devil kept him company with all manner of temptations. He could not help himself, he was driven to create anew societies, nay whole cities of anchorites. We all know those dismal towns of monks which grew up in the Thebaid; how wild, unruly a spirit dwelt among them; how deadly were their descents on Alexandria. They talked of being troubled, beset by the Devil; and they told no lie.

A huge gap was made in the world; and who was to fill it? The Christians said, The Devil, everywhere the Devil: _ubique daemon_.[6]

[6] See the Lives of the Desert Fathers, and the authors quoted by A. Maurie, _Magie_, 317. In the fourth century, the Messalians, thinking themselves full of devils, spat and blew their noses without ceasing; made incredible efforts to spit them forth.

Greece, like all other nations, had her _energumens_, who were sore tried, possessed by spirits. The relation there is quite external; the seeming likeness is really none at all. Here we have no spirits of any kind: they are but black children of the Abyss, the ideal of waywardness. Thenceforth we see them everywhere, those poor melancholics, loathing, shuddering at their own selves. Think what it must be to fancy yourself double, to believe in that _other_, that cruel host who goes and comes and wanders within you, making you roam at his pleasure among deserts, over precipices! You waste and weaken more and more; and the weaker grows your wretched body, the more is it worried by the devil. In woman especially these tyrants dwell, making her blown and swollen. They fill her with an infernal _wind_, they brew in her storms and tempests, play with her as the whim seizes them, drive her to wickedness, to despair.

And not ourselves only, but all nature, alas! becomes demoniac. If there is a devil in the flower, how much more in the gloomy forest!

The light we think so pure teems with children of the night. The heavens themselves--O blasphemy!--are full of h.e.l.l. That divine morning star, whose glorious beams not seldom lightened a Socrates, an Archimedes, a Plato, what is it now become? A devil, the archfiend Lucifer. In the eventime again it is the devil Venus who draws me into temptation by her light so soft and mild.

That such a society should wax wroth and terrible is not surprising.

Indignant at feeling itself so weak against devils, it persecutes them everywhere, in the temples, at the altars once of the ancient wors.h.i.+p, then of the heathen martyrs. Let there be more feasts?--they will likely be so many gatherings of idolaters. The Family itself becomes suspected: for custom might bring it together round the ancient Lares.

And why should there be a family?--the empire is an empire of monks.

But the individual man himself, thus dumb and isolated though he be, still watches the sky, still honours his ancient G.o.ds whom he finds anew in the stars. "This is he," said the Emperor Theodosius, "who causes famines and all the plagues of the empire." Those terrible words turned the blind rage of the people loose upon the harmless Pagan. Blindly the law unchained all its furies against the law.

Ye G.o.ds of Eld, depart into your tombs! Get ye extinguished, G.o.ds of Love, of Life, of Light! Put on the monk's cowl. Maidens, become nuns.

Wives, forsake your husbands; or, if ye will look after the house, be unto them but cold sisters.

But is all this possible? What man's breath shall be strong enough to put out at one effort the burning lamp of G.o.d? These rash endeavours of an impious piety may evoke miracles strange and monstrous. Tremble, guilty that ye are!

Often in the Middle Ages will recur the mournful tale of the Bride of Corinth. Told at a happy moment by Phlegon, Adrian's freedman, it meets us again in the twelfth, and yet again in the sixteenth century, as the deep reproof, the invincible protest of nature herself.

"A young man of Athens went to Corinth, to the house of one who had promised him his daughter. Himself being still a heathen, he knew not that the family which he thought to enter had just turned Christian.

It is very late when he arrives. They are all gone to rest, except the mother, who serves up for him the hospitable repast and then leaves him to sleep. Dead tired, he drops down. Scarce was he fallen asleep, when a figure entered the room: 'tis a girl all clothed and veiled in white; on her forehead a fillet of black and gold. She sees him. In amazement she lifts her white hand: 'Am I, then, such a stranger in the house already? Alas, poor recluse!... But I am ashamed, and withdraw. Sleep on.'

"'Stay, fair maiden! Here are Bacchus, Ceres, and with thee comes Love. Fear not, look not so pale!'

"'Ah! Away from me, young man! I have nothing more to do with happiness. By a vow my mother made in her sickness my youth and my life are bound for ever. The G.o.ds have fled, and human victims now are our only sacrifices.'

"'Ha! can it be thou, thou, my darling betrothed, who wast given me from my childhood? The oath of our fathers bound us for evermore under the blessing of heaven. Maiden, be mine!'

"'No, my friend, not I. Thou shalt have my younger sister. If I moan in my chilly dungeon, do thou in her arms think of me, of me wasting away and thinking only of thee; of me whom the earth is about to cover again.'

"'Nay, I swear by this flame, the torch of Hymen, thou shalt come home with me to my father. Rest thee, my own beloved.'

"As a wedding-gift he offers her a cup of gold. She gives him her chain, but instead of the cup desires a curl of his hair.

"It is the hour of spirits; her pale lip drinks up the dark blood-red wine. He too drinks greedily after her. He calls on the G.o.d of Love.

She still resisted, though her poor heart was dying thereat. But he grows desperate, and falls weeping on the couch. Anon she throws herself by his side.

"'Oh! how ill thy sorrow makes me! Yet, if thou wast to touch me---- Oh, horror!--white as the snow, and cold as ice, such, ah me! is thy bride.'

"'I will warm thee again: come to me, wert thou come from the very grave.'

"Sighs and kisses many do they exchange.

"'Dost thou feel how warm I am?'

"Love twines and holds them fast. Tears mingle with their joy. She changes with the fire she drinks from his mouth: her icy blood is aglow with pa.s.sion; but the heart in her bosom will not beat.

"But the mother was there listening. Soft vows, cries of wailing and of pleasure.

"'Hush, the c.o.c.k is crowing: to-morrow night!' Then with kiss on kiss they say farewell.

"In wrath the mother enters; sees what? Her daughter. He would have hidden her, covered her up. But freeing herself from him, she grew from the couch up to the roof.

"'O mother, mother, you grudge me a pleasant night; you would drive me from this cosy spot! Was it not enough to have wrapped me in my winding-sheet and borne me to the grave? A greater power has lifted up the stone. In vain did your priests drone over the trench they dug for me. Of what use are salt and water, where burns the fire of youth? The earth cannot freeze up love. You made a promise; I have just reclaimed my own.

"'Alas, dear friend, thou must die: thou wouldst but pine and dry up here. I have thy hair; it will be white to-morrow.... Mother, one last prayer! Open my dark dungeon, set up a stake, and let the loving one find rest in the flames. Let the sparks fly upward and the ashes redden. We will go to our olden G.o.ds.'"[7]

[7] Here I have suppressed a shocking phrase. Goethe, so n.o.ble in the form, is not so in the spirit of his poem. He spoils the marvel of the legend by sullying the Greek conception with a horrible Slavish idea. As they are weeping, he turns the maiden into a vampire. She comes because she thirsts for blood, that she may suck the blood from his heart. And he makes her coldly say this impious and unclean thing: "When I have done with him, I will pa.s.s on to others: the young blood shall fall a prey to my fury."

In the Middle Ages this story put on a grotesque garb, by way of frightening us with the _Devil Venus_. On the finger of her statue a young man imprudently places a ring, which she clasps tight, guarding it like a bride, and going in the night to his couch, to a.s.sert her rights. He cannot rid himself of his infernal spouse without an exorcism. The same tale, foolishly applied to the Virgin, is found in the _Fabliaux_. If my memory does not mislead me, Luther also, in his "Table Talk," takes up the old story in a very coa.r.s.e way, till you quite smell the body. The Spanish Del Rio s.h.i.+fts the scene of it to Brabant. The bride dies shortly before her marriage; the death-bells are rung. The bridegroom rushed wildly over the country. He hears a wail. It is she herself wandering about the heath. "Seest thou not"--she says--"who leads me?" But he catches her up and bears her home. At this point the story threatened to become too moving; but the hard inquisitor, Del Rio, cuts the thread.

"On lifting her veil," says he, "they found only a log of wood covered with the skin of a corpse." The Judge le Loyer, silly though he be, has restored the older version.

Thenceforth these gloomy taletellers come to an end. The story is useless when our own age begins; for then the bride has triumphed. Nature comes back from the grave, not by stealth, but as mistress of the house.

CHAPTER II.

WHY THE MIDDLE AGES FELL INTO DESPAIR.

"Be ye as newborn babes (_quasi modo geniti infantes_); be thoroughly childlike in the innocence of your hearts; peaceful, forgetting all disputes, calmly resting under the hand of Christ." Such is the kindly counsel tendered by the Church to this stormy world on the morning after the great fall. In other words: "Volcanoes, ruins, ashes, and lava, become green. Ye parched plains, get covered with flowers."

One thing indeed gave promise of the peace that reneweth: the schools were all shut up, the way of logic forsaken. A method infinitely simple for the doing away with argument, offered all men a gentle slope, down which they had nothing to do but go. If the creed was doubtful, the life was all traced out in the pathway of the legend.

From first to last but the one word _Imitation_.

"Imitate, and all will go well. Rehea.r.s.e and copy." But is this the way to that true childhood which quickens the heart of man, which leads back to its fresh and fruitful springs? In this world that is to make us young and childlike, I see at first nothing but the tokens of age; only cunning, slavishness, want of power. What kind of literature is this, confronted with the glorious monuments of Greeks and Jews? We have just the same literary fall as happened in India from Brahminism to Buddhism; a twaddling flow of words after a n.o.ble inspiration. Books copy from books, churches from churches, until they cannot so much as copy. They pillage from each other: Aix-la-Chapelle is adorned with the marbles torn from Ravenna. It is the same with all the social life of those days. The bishop-king of a city, the savage king of a tribe, alike copy the Roman magistrates. Original as one might deem them, our monks in their monasteries simply restored their ancient _Villa_, as Chateaubriand well said. They had no notion either of forming a new society or of fertilizing the old. Copying from the monks of the East, they wanted their servants at first to be themselves a barren race of monkling workmen. It was in spite of them that the family in renewing itself renewed the world.

Seeing how fast these oldsters keep on oldening; how in one age we fall from the wise monk St. Benedict down to the pedantic Benedict of Aniane;[8] we feel that such gentry were wholly guiltless of that great popular creation which bloomed amidst ruins; namely, the Lives of the Saints. If the monks wrote, it was the people made them. This young growth might throw out some leaves and flowers from the crannies of an old Roman ruin turned into a convent: but most a.s.suredly not thence did it first arise. Its roots go deep into the ground: sown by the people and cultivated by the family, it takes help from every hand, from men, from women, from children. The precarious, troubled life of those days of violence, made these poor folk imaginative, p.r.o.ne to believe in their own dreams, as being to them full of comfort: strange dreams withal, rich in marvels, in fooleries; absurd, but charming.