UUID: c8f6b79c-cad2-11e8-9acb-17532927e555
Published by BoD - Books on Demand, NorderstedtISBN: 9783748131137
This ebook was created with StreetLib Write
http://write.streetlib.com
Table of contents
INTRODUCTION
1 DEATH of the GODS
2 WHAT DROVE the MIDDLE AGES to DESPAIR
3 The LITTLE DEMON of the HEARTH and HOME
4 TEMPTATIONS
5 DIABOLICAL POSSESSION
6 The PACT with SATAN
7 KING of the DEAD
8 PRINCE of NATURE
9 SATAN the HEALER
10 CHARMS and LOVE POTIONS
11 COMMUNION of REVOLT WITCHES’ SABBATHS The BLACK MASS
12 BLACK MASS Continued LOVE and DEATH SATAN DISAPPEARS
13 The SORCERESS in HER DECADENCE SATAN MULTIPLIED and VULGARISED
14 PERSECUTIONS
15 A HUNDRED YEARS’ TOLERATION in FRANCE
16 THE BASQUE WITCHES 1609
17 SATAN TURNS ECCLESIASTIC 1610
18 GAUFFRIDI 1610
19 THE NUNS of LOUDUN URBAIN GRANDIER 1633, 1634
20 THE NUNS of LOUVIERS and SATANIC POSSESSION MADELEINE BAVENT 1640-1647
21 SATAN TRIUMPHANT in the SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
22 FATHER GIRARD and CHARLOTTE CADIÈRE
23 CHARLOTTE CADIÈRE at the CONVENT of OLLIOULES
24 TRIAL of CHARLOTTE CADIÈRE 1730, 1731
EPILOGUE
NOTES AND ELUCIDATIONS
INTRODUCTION
SPRENGER said, before 1500: "We should speak of
the Heresy of the Sorceresses, not of the Sorcerers; the latter are
of small account." So another writer under Louis XIII.: "For one
Sorcerer, ten thousand Sorceresses."
"Nature makes them Sorceresses,"—the genius peculiar to woman
and her temperament. She is born a creature of Enchantment. In
virtue of regularly recurring periods of exaltation, she is a
Sibyl; in virtue of love, a Magician. By the fineness of her
intuitions, the cunning of her wiles—often fantastic, often
beneficent—she is a Witch, and casts spells, at least and lowest
lulls pain to sleep and softens the blow of calamity.
All primitive peoples start alike; this we see again and
again in the accounts given by travellers. Man hunts and fights.
Woman contrives and dreams; she is the mother of fancy, of the
gods. She possesses glimpses of the second sight, and has wings to
soar into the infinitude of longing and imagination. The better to
count the seasons, she scans the sky. But earth has her heart as
well. Her eyes stoop to the amorous flowers; a flower herself in
her young beauty, she learns to know them as playfellows and
intimates. A woman, she asks them to heal the men she loves.
Pathetic in their simplicity these first beginnings of
Religion and Science! Later on, each province will be separated, we
shall see mankind specialise—as medicine-man, astrologer or
prophet, necromancer, priest, physician. But in these earliest days
woman is all in all, and plays every part.
A strong and bright and vigorous religion, such as was Greek
Paganism, begins with the Sibyl, to end with the Sorceress. The
first, a virgin fair and beautiful, brilliant in the full blaze of
dawn, cradled it, gave it its charm and glamour. In later days,
when sick and fallen, in the gloom of the Dark Ages, on heaths and
in forests, it was concealed and protected by the Sorceress; her
dauntless pity fed its needs and kept it still alive. Thus for
religions it is woman is mother, tender protectress and faithful
nurse. Gods are like men; they are born and they die on a woman's
breast.
But what a price she paid for her fidelity! . . . Magian
queens of Persia, enchanting Circé, sublime Sibyl, alas! how are
you fallen, how barbarous the transformation you have suffered! . .
. She who, from the throne of the Orient, taught mankind the
virtues of plants and the motions of the stars, she who, seated on
the Delphic tripod and, illumined by the very god of light, gave
oracles to a kneeling world, is the same that, a thousand years
later, is hunted like a wild beast, chased from street to street,
reviled, buffeted, stoned, scorched with red-hot embers! . . .
The clergy has not stakes enough, the people insults, the
child stones, for the unhappy being. The poet, no less a child,
throws yet another stone at her, a crueller one still for a woman.
Gratuitously insulting, he makes her out always old and ugly. The
very word Sorceress or Witch calls up the image of the Weird
Sisters of Macbeth. Yet the cruel witch trials prove exactly the
opposite; many perished just because they were young and pretty.
The Sibyl foretold the future; but the Sorceress makes it.
Here is the great, the vital distinction. She evokes, conjures,
guides Destiny. She is not like Cassandra of old, who foresaw the
coming doom so clearly, and deplored it and awaited its approach;
she creates the future. Greater than Circé, greater than Medea, she
holds in her hand the magic wand of natural miracle, she has Nature
to aid and abet her like a sister. Foreshadowings of the modern
Prometheus are to be seen in her,—a beginning of industry, above
all of the sovereign industry that heals and revivifies men. Unlike
the Sibyl, who seemed ever gazing towards the dayspring, she fixes
her eyes on the setting sun; but it is just this sombre orb of the
declining luminary that shows long before the dawn (like the glow
on the peaks of the High Alps) a dawn anticipatory of the true day.
The Priest realises clearly where the danger lies, that an
enemy, a menacing rival, is to be feared in this High-priestess of
Nature he pretends to despise. Of the old gods she has invented new
ones. Beside the old Satan of the past, a new Satan is seen
burgeoning in her, a Satan of the future.
For a thousand years the people had one healer and one
only,—the Sorceress. Emperors and kings and popes, and the richest
barons, had sundry Doctors of Salerno, or Moorish and Jewish
physicians; but the main body of every State, the whole world we
may say, consulted no one but the Saga, the Wise Woman. If her cure
failed, they abused her and called her a Witch. But more generally,
through a combination of respect and terror, she was spoken of as
the Good Lady, or Beautiful Lady (Bella Donna), the same name as
that given to fairies.
Her fate resembled that which still often befalls her
favourite herb, the belladonna, and other beneficent poisons she
made use of, and which were antidotes of the great scourges of the
Middle Ages. Children and ignorant passers-by cursed these sombre
flowers, without understanding their virtues, scared by their
suspicious colour. They shudder and fly the spot; yet these are the
Comforting plants (Solanaceæ), which, wisely administered, have
worked so many cures and soothed so much human agony.
They are found growing in the most sinister localities, in
lonely, ill-reputed spots, amid ruins and rubbish heaps,—yet
another resemblance with the Sorceress who utilises them. Where,
indeed, could she have taken up her habitation, except on savage
heaths, this child of calamity, so fiercely persecuted, so bitterly
cursed and proscribed? She gathered poisons to heal and save; she
was the Devil's bride, the mistress of the Incarnate Evil One, yet
how much good she effected, if we are to credit the great physician
of the Renaissance! Paracelsus, when in 1527, at Bâle, he burned
the whole pharmacopœia of his day, declared he had learned from the
Sorceresses all he knew.
Had they not earned some reward? Yes! and reward they had.
Their recompense was torture and the stake. New punishments were
devised for their especial benefit, new torments invented. They
were brought to trial en masse, condemned on the slightest pretext.
Never was such lavish waste of human life. To say nothing of Spain,
the classic land of the auto-da-fé, where Moor and Jew are always
associated with Witches, seven thousand were burned at Trèves, and
I know not how many at Toulouse; at Geneva five hundred in three
months (1513); eight hundred at Wurzburg, in one batch almost, and
fifteen hundred at Bamberg,—both of these quite small bishoprics!
Ferdinand II. himself, the bigot, the cruel Emperor of the Thirty
Years’ War, was forced to restrain these worthy bishops, else they
would have burned all their subjects. I find, in the Wurzburg list,
a wizard of eleven, a schoolboy, and a witch of fifteen, at
Bayonne, two sorceresses of seventeen, damnably pretty.
Mark this, at certain epochs the mere word of Sorceress or
Witch is an arm wherewith Hate can kill at discretion. Female
jealousy, masculine avarice, are only too ready to grasp so
convenient a weapon. Such and such a neighbour is rich? . . .
Witch! witch! Such and such is pretty? . . . Ah! witch! We shall
see Murgin, a little beggar-girl, casting this terrible stone at a
great lady, whose only crime was being too beautiful, the
Châtelaine de Lancinena, and marking her white forehead with the
death sign.
Accused of sorcery, women anticipate, if they can, the
torture that is inevitable by killing themselves. Remy, that worthy
judge of Lorraine who burned eight hundred of them, boasts of this
Reign of Terror: "So sure is my justice," he declared, "that
sixteen witches arrested the other day, never hesitated, but
strangled themselves incontinently."
In the long course of study for my history during the thirty
years I have devoted to it, this horrible literature of Sorcery, or
Witchcraft, has passed through my hands again and again. First I
exhausted the Manuals of the Inquisition, the asinine collections
of the Dominicans—the Whips, Hammers, Ant-Swarms, Fustigations,
Lanterns, etc., to give some of the absurd titles these books bear.
Next I read the men of the Law, the lay judges who take the place
of these monks, and who despise them without being much less
idiotic themselves. I say a word or two of these elsewhere; for the
present I have only one observation to make, viz. that from 1300
down to 1600, and even later, the administration of justice is
identically the same. With the exception of one small interlude in
the Parlement of Paris, we find always and everywhere the same
ferocity of folly. Ability and talent make no difference. The wise
and witty De Lancre, a magistrate of Bordeaux under Henri IV., a
man of enlightened ideas in politics, directly he has to deal with
witchcraft, falls back to the level of a Nider or a Sprenger, two
imbecile monks of the fifteenth century.
One is filled with amazement to see all these widely
different epochs, all these men of varying cultivation, unable to
make one step in advance. But the explanation is simple; they were
one and all arrested, let us rather say, blinded, hopelessly
intoxicated and made cruel savages of, by the poison of their first
principle, the doctrine of Original Sin. This is the fundamental
dogma of universal injustice: "All lost for one alone, not only
punished but deserving punishment, undone even before they were
born and desperately wicked, dead to God from the beginning. The
babe at its mother's breast is a damned soul already."
Who says so? All do, even Bossuet. A Roman theologian of
weight, Spina, Master of the Sacred Palace, formulates the doctrine
in precise words: "Why does God permit the death of the innocent?
He does so justly. For if they do not die by reason of the sins
they have committed, yet they are guilty of death by reason of
original sin" 1
From this monstrous theory two consequences follow, in
justice and in logic. The judge is always sure of doing justice;
anyone brought before him is inevitably guilty, and if he defends
himself, doubly guilty. No call for Justice to sweat, and rack its
brains in order to distinguish true and false; in every case the
decision is a foregone conclusion. The logician likewise and the
schoolman may spare themselves the trouble of analysing the soul of
man, of examining the phases through which it passes, of
considering its complexity, its internal disparities and
self-contradictions. No need, as we feel ourselves bound to do, to
explain how, by slow and subtle degrees, the soul may grow vicious
instead of virtuous. These refinements, these doubts and
difficulties and scruples, if they understood them at all, how they
would laugh at them, and shake their heads in scorn, and how
gracefully would the fine long ears that ornament their empty pates
waggle to and fro!
Particularly when the Compact with the Devil comes into
question, that ghastly covenant where, for some small ephemeral
gain, the soul sells itself into everlasting torment, we
philosophers should endeavour to trace out the accursed path, the
appalling ladder of calamities and crimes, capable of having
brought it so low. But our theologian can ignore all such
considerations! For him Soul and Devil were created for each other;
so that at the first temptation, for a caprice, a sudden longing, a
passing fancy, the soul flies headlong to this dreadful extremity.
Nor can I see any traces of modern writers having made much
inquiry into the moral chronology of Sorcery. They confine
themselves far too much to the connections between the Middle Ages
and Classical Antiquity. The connection is real enough, but slight
and of quite minor importance. Neither the ancient Enchantress, nor
yet the Celtic and Germanic Seeress, are yet the true Sorceress.
The harmless Sabasia (festivals of Bacchus Sabasius), a miniature
rustic "Sabbath" which survived down to Mediæval times, are far
from identical with the Black Mass of the fourteenth century, that
deliberate and deadly defiance of Jesus. These gloomy conceptions
were not passed on down the long thread of tradition; they sprang
ready made from the horrors of the time.
From when does the Sorceress date? I answer unhesitatingly,
"From the ages of despair."
From the profound despair the World owed to the Church. I say
again unhesitatingly, "The Sorceress is the Church's crime."
I pass over the string of plausible explanations by which the
priests attempt to mitigate her guilt: "Weak and frivolous by
nature, open to every temptation, women were led astray by
concupiscence." Alas! in the wretchedness and famine of those
dreadful times, this was no force sufficient to rouse to demoniac
frenzy. Loving women, jealous and forsaken, children driven out of
doors by a cruel stepmother, mothers beaten by their sons (all
hackneyed subjects of legendary tales), may indeed have been
tempted to invoke the Evil Spirit; but all this does not constitute
the Sorceress, the Witch. Because the unhappy creatures call upon
Satan, it does not follow that he accepts their service. They are
still far, very far, from being ripe for him. They have yet to
learn to hate God.
To understand this better, read the accursed Registers still
extant of the Inquisition, not in the extracts compiled by
Llorente, Lamotte-Langon, etc., but in what is extant of the
original Registers of Toulouse. Read them in their vapid sameness,
their dismal aridity, their shocking unconscious savagery. A few
pages, and you are cold at heart, a cruel chill strikes home to the
vitals. Death, death, always death, you feel it in every page. You
are already in the tomb, or immured in a little chamber of stone
with damp-stained walls. The happiest gate is death. The dreadful
thing is the in pace. One word recurs continually, like a bell of
horror tolled, and tolled again, to drive the dead in life into
despair,—always the same word, Immured.
Dread apparatus for crushing and annihilating souls, cruel
press for breaking hearts. The screw turns, and turns, till breath
fails and the very bones crack, and she springs from the horrid
engine a mystery in an unknown world!
The Sorceress has neither father nor mother, neither son, nor
mate, nor kindred. She appears none knows from whence, a monster,
an aërolite from the skies. Who so bold, great God! as to come nigh
her?
Where is her lurking-place? In untracked wilds, in
impenetrable forests of bramble, on blasted heaths, where entangled
thistles suffer no foot to pass. She must be sought by night,
cowering beneath some old-world dolmen. If you find her, she is
isolated still by the common horror of the countryside; she has, as
it were, a ring of fire round her haunts.
’Tis hard to credit it, but she is a woman still. Even this
fearful life has its spring of womanhood, its feminine electricity,
in virtue of which she is dowered with two gifts
The half-sane, half-insane madness, illuminism, of the seer,
which according to its degree is poetry, second sight,
preternatural vision, a faculty of speech at once simple and
astute, above all else the power of believing in her own
falsehoods. This gift is unknown to the male Sorcerer; the Wizard
fails to comprehend its very elements.
From it flows a second, the sublime faculty of solitary
conception, that parthenogenesis our physiologists of to-day
recognise as existing among the females of numerous species. The
same fecundity of body is no less procreative where conceptions of
the spirit are involved.
All alone, she conceived and brought forth. Whom or what?
Another of her own kind, so like the original as to cheat the eyes.
Child of hate, conceived of love; for without love nothing
can be created. The Sorceress, terror-struck as she is at her
strange offspring, yet sees herself so faithfully reproduced, finds
such content in contemplating this new idol, that instantly she
sets it on the altar, worships it, immolates herself to it, giving
her own body as victim and living sacrifice.
We shall often and often find her telling the judge: "There
is only one thing I am afraid of,—not to suffer enough for him." 2
Do you know how the newborn infant salutes the new world he
enters? With a horrid scream of laughter. And has he not good cause
to be glad, there on the free and open plains, far from the
dungeons of Spain, and the immured victims of Toulouse? His in pace
is wide as the world itself. He comes and goes, roaming where he
will. His the boundless forest! his the vast heath that stretches
away to the farthest horizon! his the round world and the riches
thereof! The Sorceress calls him tenderly, "Robin, Robin mine!
"—from the name of that gallant outlaw, the gay Robin Hood, that
lived under the greenwood tree. Another pet name she loves to give
him is Verdelet, Joli-Bois, Vert-Bois. The green woods, indeed, are
the frolicsome scamp's favourite haunts; one glimpse of bush and
briar, and he is off, a wild truant of Nature.
The astounding thing is that at the first essay the Sorceress
really and truly made a living being. He has every mark of
actuality. He has been seen and heard, and everybody can describe
him.
The saints, those children of affection, the sons of the
house, pay little heed, only watch and dream; they wait in patient
waiting, confident of getting their share of the Elect in God's
good time. The small degree of activity they possess is
concentrated within the narrow circle of Imitation—the word sums up
the Middle Ages. But for him, the bastard all curse, whose share is
only the lash, he has no thought of waiting. He is for ever prying
and searching, never an instant still, trying all things in heaven
and earth. He is to the last degree curious and inquisitive,
scrutinising, rummaging, sounding, poking his nose everywhere. At
the solemn Consummatum est he grins, and makes a derisive mow. His
word is always "Not yet!" and "Forward still!"
All the same, he is not hard to please. Nothing rebuffs him;
what Heaven throws in his way, he picks up with alacrity. For
instance the Church has rejected Nature as something impure and
suspect. Satan seizes on it, and makes it his pride and ornament.
Better still, he utilises it, turns it to profit, originates the
arts from it, accepting gladly the great name they would fain cast
at him as a stigma and a disgrace, that of Prince of this World.
"Alas for them that laugh!"—they had declared with startling
unwisdom; for what was this but giving Satan a fine initial
advantage to start with, the monopoly of laughter, and proclaiming
him amusing? Let us say necessary at once; for laughter is an
essential function of human nature. How support life at all, if we
cannot laugh,—at any rate when we are in sorrow?
The Church, which sees in our life below only a test and
trial for one to come, takes care not to prolong it needlessly. Her
medicine is resignation, a waiting and a hoping for death. Here is
a great field opened to Satan; he becomes physician, healer of
living men. Nay more! consoler as well; he has the compassion to
show us our dead, to evoke the shades of the dear ones we have
loved and lost.
Another trifle the Church has cast away and condemned—Logic,
the free exercise of Reason. Here again is an appetising dainty the
Enemy snaps up greedily.
The Church had built of solid stone and tempered mortar a
narrow in pace, vaulted, low-browed and confined, lighted by the
merest glimmer of day through a tiny slit. This they called the
schools. A few shavelings were let loose in it, and told "to be
free"; they one and all grew halting cripples. Three hundred, four
hundred years, only made them more helplessly paralysed. Between
Abelard and Occam the progress made is—nil!
A pretty tale, to say we must look there for the origin of
the Renaissance! The Renaissance came about, no doubt of that; but
how? by the satanic effort of men who broke through the vault, the
struggles of condemned criminals who would see the light of heaven.
It came about in the main far away from schools and scholastics, in
that school of wild nature where Satan lectured a truant band of
Sorceresses and shepherd lads.
A dangerous curriculum, if ever there was one! But its very
risks stimulated the love of knowledge, the frantic longing to see
and know. It was there began the black sciences, the forbidden
Chemistry of poisons, and the accursed thing, Anatomy. The
shepherd, first to scan the stars, along with his discoveries in
Astronomy, brought to the common stock his sinister recipes and his
experiments on animals. Then the Sorceress would contribute a
corpse filched from the nearest graveyard; and for the first
time—at the risk of the stake—men could contemplate that miracle of
God's handicraft "which" (as M. Serres so well said) "we hide in
silly prudishness instead of trying to understand."
The only Doctor admitted to these classes, Paracelsus, noted
a third as well, who now and again would glide in to join the
sinister conclave, bringing Surgery with him as his contribution.
This was the surgeon of those gentle times,—the Public Executioner,
the man of unflinching hand, whose plaything was the branding-iron,
who broke men's bones and could set them again, who could slay and
make alive, and hang a felon up to a certain point and no further.
This criminal University of the Sorceress, the Shepherd, and
the Hangman, by means of its experiments—a sacrilege every
one—emboldened the other and rival seat of learning and forced its
scholars to study. For each was fain to live; and otherwise the
Witch would have monopolised all, and the Schoolmen turned their
backs for good and all on Medicine. The Church had to submit, and
wink at these crimes. She allowed there were good poisons
(Grillandus); she permitted dissection in public, though
reluctantly and under dire constraint. In 1306 the Italian Mondino
opened and dissected a woman, and another in 1315. It was a solemn
and beneficent revelation, the veritable discovery of a new
world,—far more so than Christopher Columbus's. Fools shuddered,
and howled in protest; wise men dropped on their knees.
With victories like these to his credit, Satan could not but
live. Alone the Church would never have had strength to crush him.
Fire and stake were of no avail, but a certain line of policy was
more successful.
With no little astuteness the kingdom of Satan was divided
against itself. In opposition to his daughter and bride, the
Sorceress, was set her son, the Healer.
The Church, deeply and from the bottom of her heart as she
hated the latter, none the less established his monopoly, to secure
the Sorceress's ruin. She declares, in the fourteenth century, that
if a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a Witch and
must die.
But how should she study publicly? Imagine the scene, at once
ludicrous and terrible, that would have occurred if the poor savage
creature had ventured to enter the schools! What merriment and wild
gaiety! In the bale-fires of St. John's day, cats chained together
were burned to death. But think of the Sorceress bound to this
caterwauling rout of hell, the Witch screaming and roasting in the
flames, what a treat for the gentle band of young shavelings and
sucking pedants!
We shall see Satan's decadence all in good time,—a sorry
tale. We shall see him pacified, grown a good old sort. He is
robbed and pillaged, till at last, of the two masks he wore at the
Witches’ Sabbath, the foulest is adopted by Tartuffe.
His spirit is everywhere. But for himself, for his own
personality, in losing the Witch, he lost all. The Wizards were
bores, and nothing more.
Now that his fall has been so far consummated, do his foes
quite realise what they have done? Was he not a necessary actor, an
indispensable factor in the great engine of religious
faith,—something out of gear nowadays? Every organism that works
well is double, has two sides; life is hardly possible otherwise. A
certain balance between two forces is necessary, forces mutually
opposed and symmetrical, but unequal. The inferior acts as
counterpoise, corresponding to the other. The superior grows
impatient at the check, and is for abolishing it altogether. But
the wish is a mistaken one.
When Colbert, in 1672, shelved Satan with so little ceremony,
forbidding the Judges of the Realm to hear cases of Witchcraft, the
Norman Parlement, in its obstinate conservatism, its sound Norman
logicality, demonstrated the dangers attending such a decision. The
Devil is nothing less than a dogma closely bound up with all the
rest. Touch the vanquished of the ages—are you not touching the
victor too? Doubt the acts of the one—is not this paving the way to
doubt those of the other, those very miracles he did to fight the
Devil? The pillars of heaven are based in the abyss. The rash man
who shakes this infernal foundation may well crack the walls of
paradise.
Colbert paid no heed; he had so many other things to do. But
it may be the Devil heard. And his wounded spirit is greatly
consoled. In the petty trades where he now gains his
living—Spiritualism, Table-turning, and the like—he resigns himself
to insignificance, and thinks, at any rate, he is not the only
time-hallowed institution that is a-dying.
Footnotes
xiii:1 De Strigibus, ch. 9.
xvi:2 Lancre.
1 DEATH of the GODS
THERE are authors who assure us that a little
while before the final victory of Christianity a mysterious voice
was heard along the shores of the Ægean Sea, proclaiming: "Great
Pan is dead!"
The old universal god of Nature is no more. Great the
jubilation; it was fancied that, Nature being defunct, Temptation
was dead too. Storm-tossed for so many years, the human soul was to
enjoy peace at last.
Was it simply a question of the termination of the ancient
worship, the defeat of the old faith, the eclipse of time-honoured
religious forms? No! it was more than this. Consulting the earliest
Christian monuments, we find in every line the hope expressed, that
Nature is to disappear and life die out—in a word, that the end of
the world is at hand.
The game is up for the gods of life, who have so long kept up
a vain simulacrum of vitality. Their world is falling round them in
crumbling ruin. All is swallowed up in nothingness: "Great Pan is
dead!"
It was no new evangel that the gods must die. More than one
ancient cult is based on this very notion of the death of the gods.
Osiris dies, Adonis dies—it is true, in this case, to rise again.
Æschylus, on the stage itself, in those dramas that were played
only on the feast-days of the gods, expressly warns them, by the
voice of Prometheus, that one day they must die. Die! but
how?—vanquished, subjugated to the Titans, the antique powers of
Nature.
Here it is an entirely different matter. The early
Christians, as a whole and individually, in the past and in the
future, hold Nature herself accursed. They condemn her as a whole
and in every part, going so far as to see Evil incarnate, the Demon
himself, in a flower. 1 So, welcome—and the sooner the better—the
angel-hosts that of old destroyed the Cities of the Plain. Let them
destroy, fold away like a veil, the empty image of the world, and
at length deliver the saints from the long-drawn ordeal of
temptation.
The Gospel says: "The day is at hand." The Fathers say:
"Soon, very soon." The disintegration of the Roman Empire and the
inroads of the barbarian invaders raise hopes in St. Augustine's
breast, that soon there will be no city left but the City of God.
Yet how long a-dying the world is, how obstinately determined
to live on! Like Hezekiah, it craves a respite, a going backward of
the dial. So be it then, till the year One Thousand,—but not a day
longer.
Is it so certain, as we have been told over and over again,
that the old gods were exhausted, sick of themselves and weary of
existence? that out of sheer discouragement they as good as gave in
their own abdication? that Christianity was able with a breath to
blow away these empty phantoms?
They point to the gods at Rome, the gods of the Capitol,
where they were only admitted in virtue of an anticipatory death, I
mean on condition of resigning all they had of local sap, of
renouncing their home and country, of ceasing to be deities
representative of such and such a nation. Indeed, in order to
receive them, Rome had had to submit them to a cruel operation,
that left them poor, enervated, bloodless creatures. These great
centralised Divinities had become, in their official life, mere
dismal functionaries of the Roman Empire. But, though fallen from
its high estate, this Aristocracy of Olympus had in nowise involved
in its own decay the host of indigenous gods, the crowd of deities
still holding possession of the boundless plains, of woods and
hills and springs, inextricably blended with the life of the
countryside. These divinities, enshrined in the heart of oaks,
lurking in rushing streams and deep pools, could not be driven out.
Who says so? The Church herself, contradicting herself
flatly. She first proclaims them dead, then waxes indignant because
they are still alive. From century to century, by the threatening
voice of her Councils, 2 she orders them to die. . . . And lo! they
are as much alive as ever!
"They are demons . . ."—and therefore alive. Unable to kill
them, the Church suffers the innocent-hearted countryfolk to dress
them up and disguise their true nature. Legends grow round them,
they are baptised, actually admitted into the Christian hierarchy.
But are they converted? Not yet by any means. We catch them still
on the sly continuing their old heathen ways and Pagan nature.
Where are they to be found? In the desert, on lonely heaths,
in wild forests? Certainly, but above all in the house. They cling
to the most domestic of domestic habits; women guard and hide them
at board and even bed. They still possess the best stronghold in
the world—better than the temple, to wit the hearth.
History knows of no other revolution so violent and unsparing
as that of Theodosius. There is no trace elsewhere in antiquity of
so wholesale a proscription of a religion. The Persian
fire-worship, in its high-wrought purity, might outrage the visible
gods of other creeds; but at any rate it suffered them to remain.
Under it the Jews were treated with great clemency, and were
protected and employed. Greece, daughter of the light, made merry
over the gods of darkness, the grotesque pot-bellied Cabiri; but
still she tolerated them, and even adopted them as working gnomes,
making her own Vulcan in their likeness. Rome, in the pride of her
might, welcomed not only Etruria, but the rustic gods as well of
the old Italian husbandman. The Druids she persecuted only as
embodying a national resistance dangerous to her dominion.
Victorious Christianity, on the contrary, was fain to
slaughter the enemy outright, and thought to do so. She abolished
the Schools of Philosophy by her proscription of Logic and the
physical extermination of the philosophers, who were massacred
under the Emperor Valens. She destroyed or stripped the temples,
and broke up the sacred images. Quite conceivably the new legend
might have proved favourable to family life, if only the father had
not been humiliated and annulled in St. Joseph, if the mother had
been given prominence as the trainer, the moral parent of the child
Jesus. But this path, so full of rich promise, was from the first
abandoned for the barren ambition of a high, immaculate purity.
Thus Christianity deliberately entered on the lonely road of
celibacy, one the then world was making for of its own impulse—a
tendency the imperial rescripts fought against in vain. And
Monasticism helped it on the downward slope.
Men fled to the desert; but they were not alone. The Devil
went with them, ready with every form of temptation. They must
needs revolutionise society, found cities of solitaries,—it was of
no avail. Everyone has heard of the gloomy cities of anchorites
that grew up in the Thebaïd, of the turbulent, savage spirit that
animated them, and of their murderous descents upon Alexandria.
They declared they were possessed of the Devil, impelled by
demons,—and they told only the truth.
There was an enormous void arisen in Nature's plan. Who or
what should fill it? The Christian Church is ready with an answer:
The Demon, everywhere the Demon—Ubique Dæmon. 3
Greece no doubt, like all other countries, had had its
energumens, men tormented, possessed by spirits. But the similarity
is purely external and accidental, the resemblance more apparent
than real. In the Thebaïd it is no case of spirits either good or
bad, but of the gloomy children of the pit, wilfully perverse and
malignant. Everywhere, for years to come, these unhappy
hypochondriacs are to be seen roaming the desert, full of
self-loathing and self-horror. Try to realise, indeed, what it
means,—to be conscious of a double personality, to really believe
in this second self, this cruel indweller that comes and goes and
expiates within you, and drives you to wander forth in desert
places and over precipices. Thinner and weaker grows the sufferer;
and the feebler his wretched body, the more fiercely the demon
harries it. Women in particular are filled, distended, inflated by
these tyrants, who impregnate them with the infernal aura, stir up
internal storm and tempest, make them the sport and plaything of
their every caprice, force them into sin and despair.
Nor is it human beings only that are demoniac. Alas! all
Nature is tainted with the horror. If the devil is in a flower, how
much more in the gloomy forest! The light that seemed so clear and
pure is full of the creatures of night. The Heavens full of
Hell,—what blasphemy! The divine morning star, that has shed its
sparkling beam on Socrates, Archimedes, Plato, and once and again
inspired them to sublimer effort, what is it now?—a devil, the
great devil Lucifer. At eve, it is the devil Venus, whose soft and
gentle light leads mortals into temptation.
I am not surprised at such a society turning mad and savage.
Furious to feel itself so weak against the demons, it pursues them
everywhere, in the temples and altars of the old faith to begin
with, later in the heathen martyrs. Festivals are abolished; for
may they not be assemblages for idolatrous worship? Even the family
is suspect; for might not the force of habit draw the household
together round the old classic Lares? And why a family at all? The
empire is an empire of monks.
Yet the individual man, isolated and struck silent as he is,
still gazes at the skies, and in the heavenly host finds once more
the old gods of his adoration. "This is what causes the famines,"
the Emperor Theodosius declares, "and all the other scourges of the
Empire,"—a terrible dictum that lets loose the blind rage of the
fanatic populace on the heads of their inoffensive Pagan
fellow-citizens. The Law blindly unchains all the savagery of
mob-law.
Old gods of Heathendom, the grave gapes for you! Gods of
Love, of Life, of Light, darkness waits to engulf you! The cowl is
the only wear. Maidens must turn nuns; wives leave their husbands,
or if they still keep the domestic hearth, be cold and continent as
sisters.
But is all this possible? Who shall be strong enough with one
breath to blow out the glowing lamp of God? So reckless an
enterprise of impious piety may well bring about strange,
monstrous, and astounding results. . . . Let the guilty tremble!
Repeatedly in the Middle Ages shall we find the gloomy story
recurring of the Bride of Corinth. First told in quite early days
by Phlegon, the Emperor Hadrian's freedman, it reappears in the
twelfth century, and again in the sixteenth,—the deep reproach, as
it were, the irrepressible protest of outraged Nature.
"A young Athenian goes to Corinth, to the house of the man
who promises him his daughter in marriage. He is still a Pagan, and
is not aware that the family he hopes to become a member of has
just turned Christian. He arrives late at night. All are in bed,
except the mother, who serves the meal hospitality demands, and
then leaves him to slumber, half dead with fatigue. But hardly is
he asleep, when a figure enters the room,—a maiden, clad in white,
wearing a white veil and on her brow a fillet of black and gold.
Seeing him, she raises her white hand in surprise: 'Am I then
already so much a stranger in the house? . . . Alas! poor recluse.
. . . But I am filled with shame, I must begone.' 'Nay! stay, fair
maiden; here are Ceres and Bacchus, and with you, love! Fear not,
and never look so pale!' 'Back, back, I say! I have no right to
happiness any more. By a vow my sick mother made, youth and life
are for ever fettered. The gods are no more, and the only
sacrifices now are human souls.' 'What! can this be you? You, my
promised bride I love so well, promised me from a child? Our
fathers’ oath bound us indissolubly together under Heaven's
blessing. Maiden! be mine!' 'No! dear heart, I cannot. You shall
have my young sister. If I groan in my chill prison-house, you in
her arms must think of me, me who waste away in thoughts of you,
and who will soon be beneath the sod.' 'No! no! I call to witness
yonder flame; it is the torch of Hymen. You shall come with me to
my father's house. Stay with me, my best beloved!' For wedding gift
he offers her a golden cup. She gives him her neck-chain; but
chooses rather than the cup a curl of his hair.
"’Tis the home of spirits; she drinks with death-pale lips
the dark, blood-red wine. He drinks eagerly after her, invoking the
God of Love. Her poor heart is breaking, but still she resists. At
last in despair he falls weeping on the bed. Then throwing herself
down beside him: 'Ah! how your grief hurts me! Yet the horror of
it, if you so much as touched me! White as snow, and cold as ice,
such alas! and alas! is your promised bride.' 'Come to me! I will
warm you, though you should be leaving the very tomb itself. . . .'
Sighs, kisses pass between the pair. 'Cannot you feel how I burn?'
Love unites them, binds them in one close embrace, while tears of
mingled pain and pleasure flow. Thirstily she drinks the fire of
his burning mouth; her chilled blood is fired with amorous ardours,
but the heart stands still within her bosom.
"But the mother was there, though they knew it not, listening
to their tender protestations, their cries of sorrow and delight.
'Hark! the cock-crow! Farewell till to-morrow, to-morrow night!' A
lingering farewell, and kisses upon kisses!
"The mother enters furious, to find her daughter! Her lover
strives to enfold her, to hide her, from the other's view; but she
struggles free, and towering aloft from the couch to the vaulted
roof: 'Oh! mother, mother! so you begrudge me my night of joy, you
hunt me from this warm nest. Was it not enough to have wrapped me
in the cold shroud, and borne me so untimely to the tomb? But a
power beyond you has lifted the stone. In vain your priests droned
their prayers over the grave; of what avail the holy water and the
salt, where youth burns hot in the heart? Cold earth cannot freeze
true Love! . . . You promised; I am returned to claim my promised
happiness. . . .
"'Alack! dear heart, you must die. You would languish here
and pine away. I have your hair; ’twill be white to-morrow. 4 . . .
Mother, one last prayer! Open my dark dungeon, raise a funeral
pyre, and let my loving heart win the repose the flames alone can
give. Let the sparks fly upward and the embers glow! We will back
to our old gods again.'"
Footnotes4:1 Compare Muratori, Script. It., i. 293, 545, on St. Cyprian;
A. Maury, Magie, 435.
5:2 See Mansi, Baluze; Council of Arles, 442; Tours, 567;
Leptines, 743; the Capitularies, etc. Gerson even, towards 1400.
6:3 See the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert, and the
authors quoted by A. Maury, Magie, 317. In the fourth century the
Messalians, believing themselves to be full of demons, were
constantly blowing their noses, and spitting unceasingly, in their
incredible efforts to expectorate these.
10:4 At this point of the story I suppress an expression that
may well shock us. Goethe, so noble in the form of his writings, is
not equally so in the spirit. He quite mars the wonderful tale,
fouling the Greek with a gruesome Slavonic notion. At the instant
when the lovers are dissolved in tears, he makes the girl into a
vampire. She curses because she is athirst for blood, to suck his
heart's blood. The poet makes her say coldly and calmly this
impious and abominable speech: "When he is done, I will go on to
others; the new generation shall succumb to my fury."
The Middle Ages dress up this tradition in grotesque garb to
terrify us with the devil Venus. Her statue receives from a young
man a ring, which he imprudently places on her finger. Her hand
closes on it, she keeps it as a sign of betrothal; then at night,
comes into his bed to claim the rights it confers. To rid him of
his hellish bride, an exorcism is required (S. Hibb., part iii.
chap. iii. 174). The same story occurs in the Fabliaux, but
absurdly enough applied to the Virgin. Luther repeats the classical
story, if my memory serves me, in his Table-talk, but with great
coarseness, letting us smell the foulness of the grave. The
Spaniard Del Rio transfers the scene from Greece to Brabant. The
affianced bride dies shortly before the wedding-day. The
passing-bell is tolled; the grief-stricken bridegroom roams the
fields in despair. He hears a wail; it is the loved one wandering
over the heath. . . . "See you not," she cries, "who my guide is?"
"No!" he replies, and seizing her, bears her away to his home. Once
there, the account was very near growing over tender and touching.
The grim inquisitor, Del Rio, cuts short the thread with the words,
"Lifting the veil, they found a stake with a dead woman's skin
drawn over it." The Judge Le Loyes, though not much given to
sensibility, nevertheless reproduces for us the primitive form of
the legend. After him, there is an end of these gloomy
story-tellers, whose trade is done. Modern days begin, and the
Bride has won the day. Buried Nature comes back from the tomb, no
longer a stealthy visitant, but mistress of the house and home.
2 WHAT DROVE the MIDDLE AGES to DESPAIR
"BE YE like unto new-born babes" (quasi modo
geniti infantes); be little children for innocence of heart, and
peacefulness and forgetfulness of all causes of offence, calm and
serene, under the hand of Jesus.
Such is the sweet counsel the Church gives this stormy world
on the morrow of the great catastrophe. In other words: "Volcanoes,
scoriæ, ashes, lava, grow green and lush with grass. Fields burned
up with fire, come, carpet yourselves with flowers."
One circumstance, it is true, then was promised the peace
that revivifies,—all the schools were ended, the path of logic
abandoned and deserted. A method of infinite simplicity rendered
all discussion futile, and set before the feet of all the easy
downward road they must needs follow henceforth. If the Credo was
of doubtful interpretation, still life was all traced out plainly
enough in the track of legend. The first word, and the last, was
the same,—Imitation.
"Imitate, and all will be well; only repeat and copy." Yes!
but is this really and truly the way of genuine infancy, the
infancy that vivifies the heart of man, makes him find new sources
of refreshment and fertility? To begin with, I can see in this
world that moulds childhood and infancy only attributes of
senility, over-refinement, servility, impotence. What is this
literature compared with the sublime monuments of Greeks and Jews?
even compared with the Roman genius? We find precisely the same
literary decline that befell in India, from Brahminism to Buddhism;
a garrulous verbiage succeeding to lofty inspiration.
One book plagiarises another, till presently they cannot even
copy correctly. They rob one from the other, and the marbles of
Ravenna are torn down to adorn Aix-la-Chapelle. The whole fabric of
society is of a piece; the bishop who is lord of a city, the
barbarian prince of a half-savage tribe, model themselves on the
Roman magistrature. Our monks we think so original, are only
repeating in their monastery the villa of an earlier day, as
Chateaubriand well observes. They have no notion of fashioning a
new society, any more than of refertilising the old. Mere imitators
of the Eastern monks, they would fain have had their dependants
poor monkish taskmen, a sterile population of celibate lay
brothers. It was in their despite family life renewed itself, and
so renewed the world.
When we observe how quickly these old monks are ageing, how
in a single century the level drops from the wise monk St. Benedict
to the pedant Benedict of Ariane, we clearly realise that these
gentry were purely and entirely innocent of the grand popular
creation that grew up about the ruins; I refer to the Lives of the
Saints. The monks wrote them, but it was the people made them. This
young vegetation may throw its luxuriance of leaf and blossom over
the crumbling walls of the old Roman building converted into a
monastery, but it does not grow out of it, we may be very sure. It
has roots deep in the soil; the people sowed it there, the family
worked the ground, all took a hand in its production—men, women,
and children. The precarious, restless life of those times of
violence made these poor countryfolk imaginative, ready to put
faith in their own dreams that consoled them in their misery,—wild
dreams, teeming with wonders and full of absurdities, equally
ludicrous and delightful.
These families, living isolated in the woods or on the
mountains (as men live still in the Tyrol and the High Alps),
coming down to the plains but one day in the week, were filled with
the hallucinations their loneliness encouraged. A child had seen
this, a woman had dreamed that. A brand-new Saint arose in the
district; his story ran through the countryside, like a ballad, in
rough-and-ready rhyme. It was sung and danced at evening under the
oak by the fountain. The priest who came on Sunday to say Mass in
the forest chapel found the legendary song in every mouth already.
Then he said to himself: "Well! after all, the tale is a beautiful
one and an edifying; . . . it does honour to the Church. Vox
populi, vox Dei! . . . But however did they come across it?" Then
would they show him authentic witnesses, of unimpeachable
veracity,—the tree, the rock, that saw the apparition, the miracle.
What more could be said after that?
Reported at the Abbey, the legend will soon find a monk, good
for nothing better, whose only craft is the pen, both curious and
credulous, ready to believe anything and everything miraculous. He
writes it all out, embroiders the simple tale with his vapid
rhetoric, spoils it somewhat. But at any rate here it is duly
recorded and recognised, read in refectory, and before long in
church. Recopied, loaded, overloaded with embellishments, often
grotesque embellishments, it will descend from age to age, till at
last it takes honourable rank and place in the Golden Legend.
Even to-day, when we read these beautiful tales, when we
listen to the simple, artless, solemn melodies into which these
rustic populations put all their young enthusiasm, we cannot but
recognise a very real inspiration, and bewail the irony of fate
when we think what was to be their eventual lot.
These people had taken literally the Church's touching
appeal: "Be ye as little children." But they applied it to the very
thing least dreamed in the original conception. The more
Christianity had feared and abhorred Nature, the more these folk
loved her and held her good and harmless,—even sanctified her,
giving her a part to play in the legend.
The animals which the Bible so harshly calls hairy beasts,
and which the monk mistrusts, fearing to find demons incarnated in
them, come into these charming tales in the most touching way, as,
for instance, the hind that warms and comforts Geneviève de
Brabant.
Even apart from the life of legends, in everyday existence,
these humble fireside friends, these gallant helpers in the day's
work, gain a higher place in men's esteem. They have their proper
rights, 1 and their proper estate. If in God's infinite goodness
there is room for the lowliest, if He ever seems to have a
preference for such out of pity, why should not my ass be allowed
in church? He has his defects, no doubt,—which makes him only the
more like me. He is a sturdy fellow to work, but thickskulled; he
is intractable and obstinate, in one word, he is my very
counterpart.
Hence those grand festivals, the most beautiful of the Middle
Ages, of the Innocents, of Fools, of the Ass. It is the very people
of that day which in the ass presents its own likeness in person
before the altar, ugly, ludicrous, and down-trodden! Truly a
touching sight! Led by Balaam, he enters solemnly between the Sibyl
and Virgil, 2 enters to bear witness. If of old he kicked against
Balaam, this was because he saw flashing before him the sword of
the old Law. But here the Law is abrogated and done with, and the
world of Grace seems to open wide its doors to receive the
lowliest, the simple ones of the earth. The people believes it all
in the innocency of its heart. Hence the sublime canticle, in which
it addressed the ass, as it might have addressed itself:—
A genoux, et dis Amen!
Assez mangé d'herbe et de foin!
Laisse les vieilles choses, et va! 3
Le neuf emporte le vieux!
La vérité fait fuir l’ombre!
La lumière chasse la nuit! 3
What insolence and wrong-headedness! Is this what they
required of you, disobedient, unruly children, when they told you
to be as little children? They offered you milk; you drink strong
wine instead. They would lead you gently, bridle in hand, by the
narrow way. Gentle, timid creatures, you seemed afraid to put one
foot before another. Then behold! of a sudden the bridle is broken
. . . one leap, and you swap over the course.
Ah! how unwise it was to let you invent your saints, and
raise your altar, then bedeck and load and bury it in flowers, till
its original form is all but indistinguishable. What can be
discerned is the old heresy, long ago condemned by the Church, the
innocence of Nature. An old heresy do I say? Nay! rather a new
heresy that will live many a long day yet,—the emancipation of
mankind.
Now listen and obey:
It is expressly forbidden to invent, to create. No more
originality; no more legends; no more new saints. There are enough
already. Forbidden to innovate in the forms of worship with new
melodies; inspiration is prohibited. Any martyrs that should come
to light are to keep quiet in their graves, and wait with becoming
humility till the Church recognises them. Forbidden for clergy or
monks to confer on peasants the tonsure that enfranchises them.
Such the narrow, timid spirit of the Carlovingian Church, 4 which
deliberately contradicts herself, gives herself the lie, now says
to little children, "Be ye old men!"
What a change is here! But can it be meant seriously? Did
they not tell us to be young? Nay! the priest is no longer
identical with the people. A mighty divorce is beginning, an
infinite gulf of separation. Henceforth the priest, a great lord
now or a prince, will sing the Office in a golden cope, using the
sovereign tongue of the great empire that is no more. We, poor
cattle of the field, having lost the language of mankind, the only
one God will deign to hear, what can we do now but low and bleat,
in company with the innocent companion that never scorns us, that
in wintertime warms us in the stall and covers us with his fleece?
We will live with the dumb beasts, and be dumb ourselves.
In very truth, we have then the less need to go to Church.
But she will not let us off; she orders us back, to listen to words
we cannot understand.
From that day forth a monstrous fog, a heavy, grey, leaden
fog, enwraps the world. Say, for how long? for a thousand long,
dreary, terrible years! For ten whole centuries, a languor no
previous age has known oppressed the Middle Ages, even to some
extent later times, in a condition midway between sleep and waking,
under the empire of a dismal, an intolerable phenomenon,—that
convulsion of supreme boredom we call a yawn.
The indefatigable church bell rings out the accustomed
hours,—and folks yawn; a nasal chant drones on in antiquated
Latin,—and folks yawn. Everything is foreseen; no room is left for
hope in all the world. Day after day events will recur in
identically the same way. The inevitable oppression of to-morrow
makes men yawn before to-day is done, and the never-ending
perspective of days, and years, of weary sameness still to come,
weighs on the spirits beforehand and sickens of life. From brain to
stomach, from stomach to mouth, the automatic, the fatally
irresistible, convulsion travels, distending the jaws in an endless
and cureless gape. A veritable disease, which pious Bretons openly
avow, imputing it, it is true, to the Devil's machinations. He lies
crouching in the woods, say the Breton peasants; to the herdsman as
he passes with his beasts, he sings Vespers and all the other
Offices, and sets him yawning, yawning till he is like to die. 5
To be old is to be feeble. When the Saracens, when the
North-men, threaten us, what will be our fate, if the people is
still old and decrepit? Charlemagne weeps unavailing tears, and the
Church with him, confessing that the holy relics, against these
barbarian demons, can no longer protect the altars. 6 Were it not
well to appeal to the arm of the intractable child they were going
to bind, the arm of the young giant they were fain to paralyse? A
self-contradictory movement marks the ninth century throughout,—at
one time the people is held back, at another pushed forward, at one
time feared, at another appealed to for help. With the people's
aid, by the people's hands, barriers are thrown up, shelters
contrived, to stop the barbarian invaders, to protect the priests,
and the saints, escaped from their churches.
Despite the Bald Emperor's prohibition, a castle-keep rises
on the mountain height. There the fugitive arrives, "Take me in, in
God's name,—at any rate my wife and children. I will camp with my
bestial in your outer bailey." The castle restores his courage and
he feels himself a man at last. It shelters him; he defends it, and
so protects his protector.
In earlier days the poor, under stress of famine, surrendered
themselves to the rich and powerful as serfs. Now it is very
different; he gives himself as vassal, that is to say, brave and
valiant champion. 7
He gives himself, yet remains his own man, keeping the right
to renounce his allegiance. "I am for higher things; the world is
wide. I too, as well as another, may raise my castle on the steep.
. . . I have defended the outside; I shall know how to guard my
head in the inside."
Here we have the grand, noble origin of the Feudal world. The
man of the keep received his vassals, but said to them, "You shall
leave me when you will, and I will even help you to do it, if
needful; so far, indeed, that if you are mired, I will get down off
my horse myself to succour you." This is the ancient formula word
for word. 8
But one morning what is this I see? Do my eyes deceive me?
The Lord of the Valley sallies forth to raid the lands round about,
sets up landmarks none may overpass, and even invisible lines of
demarcation. "What is it? What does it mean?" . . . It means that
the Lordship is enclosed: "The Feudal Lord, under lock and key,
holds all immured, between sky and earth."
Alas! alas! By virtue of what right is the vassus (the
valiant man, that is) henceforth to be a prisoner? Nay! vassus,
they will maintain, may equally be equivalent to slave.
In the same way servus, meaning servant (often a high-born
servant, a Count or Prince of the Empire), will signify for the
weak and lowly, a serf, a villein whose life is valued at a denier.
This is the hateful net they are taken in. But yonder on his
plot of ground is one who maintains his land is free, an allod
(allodium, aleu), a "fief of the sun." He sits on his
boundary-stone, crushes his hat down firm on his head, and watches
the Feudal Lord, the Emperor himself, pass by. 9
"Go your ways, ride on, Emperor, you sit tight in your
saddle, and I on my boundary-stone yet tighter. You pass, but I
remain. . . . For I am Freedom."
But . . . I have not the heart to tell the man's eventual
fate. The air thickens round him, and his breath fails more and
more. He seems bewitched. He cannot move, he is as if paralysed.
His beasts too grow thinner and thinner, as though a spell were on
them. His servants die of hunger. His land is fallen barren. He is
hag-ridden o’ nights.
Still he holds on; he says, "A poor man's house is his
castle."
But they will not leave him alone. He is cited, and must
answer, to the Imperial Court. He repairs thither, a survival from
a vanished world, a spectre of the past, a thing unrecognisable.
"What is it?" the younger men ask each other. "He is neither
Seigneur nor serf! Why, then, what is he? He is nothing."
"'Who am I?' ask you? I am he who built the first
castle-keep, and defended it in your behoof; he who, leaving its
walls, strode bravely to the bridge to meet the heathen Northmen. .
. . More than that, I dammed the river, I reclaimed the alluvial
waste, I created the very soil, like God who made 'the dry land
appear.' . . . This soil, who shall drive me off it?"
"Nay, my friend," answered his neighbour, "you shall not be
driven off it. You shall cultivate it still, this soil . . . only
on other conditions from what you think. . . . Remember, good
friend, how in the heedlessness of youth (it is fifty years agone
now) you wedded Jacqueline, a little maid of my father's serfs. . .
. Remember the maxim: 'Who treads my hen, is my cock.' You belong
to my hen-roost. Come, off belt and away sword! . . . Henceforth
you are my serf."
There is no invention here; it is all bare truth. The
atrocious story recurs over and over again in the Middle Ages. And
what a bitter weapon of tyranny it was! I have abridged and omitted
much, for every time one returns to these incidents, the same sharp
point of pity and indignation pierces the heart.
One there was who, under so dire an outrage, fell into such a
passion of fury he could find never a word to say. ’Twas like
Roland betrayed at Roncesvaux. All the blood of his body rose to
his throat and choked him. . . . His eyes flashed fire, his poor
dumb mouth, dumb but so fiercely eloquent, turned all the
assemblage pale. . . . They shrank back in terror. . . . He was
dead. His veins had burst. . . . His arteries shot the red blood
into the very faces of his murderers. 10
This instability of condition and tenure, this horrid,
shelving declivity, down which a man slips from free man to
vassal,—from vassal to servant,—from servant to serf, is the great
terror of the Middle Ages, the basis of its despair. There is no
way of escape; one step, and the man is lost. He is an alien, a
waif and stray, a head of wild game; serfdom or death, these are
the only alternatives. The heavy soil clogs the feet, and entangles
and engulfs the passer-by in its miry depths. The poisoned air
kills him, lays its dead hand on him, turns him into a dead man, a
nonentity, a brute beast, a life priced at ten farthings,—a life
anyone may take and expiate the murder for ten farthings down. Such
were the two main, external features of Mediæval wretchedness, the
two great hardships that drove men to give themselves to Satan. Now
to look at the internal aspect, to examine the foundations of life
and character, and sound the depths of human existence, at the same
unhappy period.
Footnotes14:1 See J. Grimm, Rechts Alterthümer, and Michelet, Origines
du Droit.
14:2 From the ritual of Rouen. See Ducange, under Festum;
Carpentier, under Kalendæ, and Martène, iii. 110. The Sibyl was
crowned, followed by Jews and Gentiles, by Moses and the Prophets,
Nebuchadnezzar, etc. From the earliest times, and from century to
century, the seventh to the sixteenth, the Church endeavours vainly
to proscribe the great popular festivals of the Ass, of the
Innocents, of Children, and of Fools. She meets with no success,
previously to the rise of the modern spirit.
14:3
"Down on your knees, and Amen say!
Enough you've eat of grass and hay!
Leave go old things, and up, away!
15:3
The new world puts the old to flight!
Truth turns the gloomy dusk to light!
Dawn's brightness drives away the night!"
Vetustatem novitas,
Umbram fugat claritas,
Noctem lux eliminat.
(Rouen Ritual.)
15:4 See the Capitularies passim.
17:5 A very famous Breton (Renan), last man of the Middle
Ages, but who was nevertheless a friend of my own, on the occasion
of the quite ineffectual journey he made for the conversion of
Rome, received brilliant offers when in the Eternal City. "What
would you have?" the Pope asked him. "One thing and one thing only:
a dispensation from the Breviary . . . I am sick to death of it."
17:6 Such was Hincmar's well-known admission.
17:7 A distinction too little appreciated, too little
noticed, by writers who have enlarged upon personal surrender,
"recommendation" to a superior, etc.
18:8 Grimm, Rechts Alterthümer; Michelet, Origines du Droit.
18:9 Grimm, on the word aleu (allodium).