Studies in Mediaeval Life and Literature Part 11

Her mind was mastered by the greatness of his reputation, her eye was taken with his beauty, her imagination was fascinated by his universal charm: it is no wonder that she was flattered and bewitched into loving him. But the completeness and devotion and ecstatic self-oblivion of the love she gave him is a wonder. Her generous faith, though to an undeserving object, communicates to the ineffective results of her life an ideal value; by a supreme self-forgetting, she rendered herself worthy to be always remembered.

Abelard's was a stormy life in a stormy age, when the scholars fought quite as bitterly as the soldiers, and the last forty-four years of Heloise's life were the tragedy of being buried alive, unable to die.

But for a few months in this year 1118, both found perfect happiness. We have a pretty picture outlined for us of the way their time went.

Abelard says: "We used to have our books open, but we talked more of love than about the reading, there were more kisses than ideas. Love made pictures of each of us in the other's eyes more often than we turned our eyes upon the books."

Every now and then this great philosopher appeared in a new role. As to most of the highest men, Nature had given him a great deal more than brains. He had a wonderfully fine voice, was fond of music, and as poets in those days went, he was a poet. He had stopped constructing dialectics, but his mind could not be inactive; so he took up the art of song-writing and song-making, and wrote love-lyrics and many of them, almost all directly in the praise of Heloise. Nor was he content to praise her to her own ears alone; the man was past all prudence in the violence of his new absorption. He let others hear them, and no doubt his hateful egotism was flattered by the thought that the most fascinating girl in all France would thus become known as his mistress.

The lyrics at once caught the popular fancy; we hear of them as spreading over the country, sung everywhere by the light-minded. Many years later, Heloise wrote that if any woman's heart could have resisted Abelard's other magic, to read his songs and to hear him sing them would surely have conquered her.

The neglect of his work, and the notoriety of these love-ditties after a while made public Abelard's real relation to his pupil. Yet for some time after the world at large understood it, the devoted uncle and guardian of the girl heard nothing, and after the rumors did begin to reach him, he obstinately refused to believe them. Nothing in the whole history shows the essential goodness of Heloise more significantly than the canon Fulbert's complete incredulity; for as the event proved, his nature was not so gentle as to repudiate harsh thoughts without the strongest prepossessions. When the truth was forced upon him, his distress was so intense that even the cold-hearted Abelard was compelled to pity him. But if Abelard pitied the uncle, how much greater his distress for the niece, and greater still, unfortunately, his apprehension for himself. Egotist he proved himself, but he proved himself also Heloise's real lover. "First we lived together in one house," he says, "but at last in one soul." In the crash of public disgrace, "neither of us complained of personal suffering, but each for the suffering that came to the other," and the bodily separation that ensued, he says with a touch of real feeling, was "the greatest linking of our souls."

Soon after the separation, Abelard discovered that Heloise required more care and comforts than the heart-broken and embittered Fulbert would be likely to provide, and he devised and carried through a plan to take her back to his own country, to his sister's house. There, amid the scenes of her lover's boyhood, in that Brittany whose legend and poetry have blessed us with so many of our loveliest romances, this heroine of a deeper romance than any of fiction found a home for several months. We may guess that the home was pleasant to her, for the lady with whom she lived afterwards entered the abbey of which Heloise was prioress.

Abelard meanwhile was continuing his lectures in Paris, fearing--he seems to have been at all times a great deal of a coward--the personal violence from Heloise's family which the fierce habits of the age gave him reason to antic.i.p.ate. At last the distress of Fulbert touched his better feeling into the wish to give him comfort, this long separation from Heloise he found hard to support, and his fear of revenge constantly increased. These motives induced a promise to rectify his offence by marriage. He made only one condition--that the marriage should be secret.

On the whole, this is perhaps the most favorable exhibition of himself that Abelard ever made. With all deductions for selfish considerations, it is reasonable to allow some weight to moral feeling, and a good deal more to devotion for the girl. This renders it all the sadder to find him some sixteen years later referring to this best act of his life with a feeble apology. "Let no one," he entreats, "wonder at my offer of marriage, who has felt the power of love, and known how the greatest men have been overthrown by woman."

Even here when his feeling for Heloise seems strongest, we see that his selfish ambition was stronger still. Secular as his tastes were, bound to the church by his intellectual side only, he still hoped to rise to ecclesiastical dignities and power. From very early times the disposition for a celibate clergy had been strong, and five years before Abelard's birth Hildebrand had declared that no married priest should have any part in the celebration of the ma.s.s. Quite apart from all questions of marriage, Abelard seems to have had scarcely any chance of distinguished clerical dignity; the student crowds might follow him, but the leaders of the church were dead set against his rationalism; they feared and hated the arrogant and progressive thinker. If Abelard had acted like a man, and had openly chosen married love with the girl whose mind and heart were, either of them, better than the best of life's other gifts, the misfortunes of his distressed later career might have been avoided, and Heloise, after a happy and lovely life, would be no more remembered to-day than the flowers she had gathered, or the birds she heard sing. But because the man, not quite unprincipled, was yet not true, he brought death upon his own good name, and upon Heloise a melancholy life with which she paid too dear for all the remembrance and love that the ages have given her. To his selfishness we owe the sweetest and saddest story which the middle ages have bequeathed us; but we think of the words of Demodocus, as he recites in the Odyssey the story of heroes dead: "This the G.o.ds contrived, and for these they ordained destruction, so that the people of times to come might have a song."

His mind once made up, Abelard started for Brittany, to see the son of whose birth he had just heard, and to take back the mother as his bride.

But when this resolution was known to Heloise, he met an unexpected opposition. She said she did not wish him to marry her, and persisted in her refusal.

Unwomanly does it appear, this unwillingness of Heloise to become her lover's wife? She knew Abelard's vehement ambition, the impossibility of its being satisfied if he was known to be a married man, the practical certainty that her family would prefer the redemption of her reputation to her husband's success. So she told Abelard that to marry her would be dangerous to him,--but still more, that it would be disgraceful. She talked to him in the role of a learned and ascetic mediaeval preacher; she seems to draw a monk's rough robe about her girlish figure, to disguise her tones, and to m.u.f.fle her bright face in a cowl. We have long, formally rendered objections, a crowd of citations from the Bible, Cicero, Theophrastus, Jerome, Josephus, Augustine,--to prove marriage less honorable than celibacy, devotion to knowledge a duty not to be interfered with by the responsibilities and annoyances of a family, conformity to the rules of the church the highest obligation. Her desire for his own greatness completely overshadows her pa.s.sion for his love.

He is already the first of philosophers, but if he has outrivalled others, he must go on to surpa.s.s himself. For this, he must have quiet and solitude, freedom for thought. She quotes a Roman maxim that all things are to be neglected for philosophy. What monks endure through love of G.o.d, the thinker ought to endure from devotion to truth. If laymen and gentiles have lived thus continently, bound by no religious profession, what does it become a clerk and a canon to do? "If you regard not G.o.d, at least care for philosophy."

"For what harmony is there," she asks, "between a scholar and a nurse, a writing-desk and a cradle, books and spinning-wheels? Who when absorbed in religious or philosophic meditation can endure hearing children cry, or having to listen to the lullabies of the woman who soothes them? Rich people can get along, for they have abundant room and plenty of servants; but scholars are not rich." She has difficulty in keeping herself disguised: in the excess of her feeling she throws out her arms, and discloses the gracious outline of the unselfish woman. Then, after reasoning, come personal pleadings. Is he sacrificing himself for her?

She is content as she is. Now she holds him by the free gift of that love and favor to which he would have a claim in marriage. Does he believe she feels herself disgraced by this relation? To be called his mistress is dear and enn.o.bling to her. Years later when she was past her middle life, she wrote to Abelard that "the name of mistress, or even of harlot, was sweeter to me then the holier name of wife, so that by my greater humiliation I might gain greater favor and less injure thy fame.

I call G.o.d to witness that if Augustus would have set me by himself at the head of the whole world, it would have seemed to me more dear and n.o.ble to be called thy mistress than his empress."

Thus by argument, authority, protestation that her sacrifice is choice, she tries to conquer his decision. Nay, she throws aside the cowl entirely, and by her natural bright humor tries to banter him into acquiescence. "And then think," she says in substance, "what a plague a wife is to a man. Only imagine" (and she laughs, and Abelard laughs too, at the inconceivable grotesqueness of the idea), "imagine what a shrew I might turn out! I might treat you as Xanthippe treated _her_ philosopher." She reminds him of the pa.s.sage where Jerome tells the story about Socrates' wife having fretted and scolded and raged one day through the house with desperate temper, until she wound up by throwing a basin of dirty water over him:

"He took it patiently, and wiped his head: 'Rain follows thunder,'--that was all he said."

To Abelard's credit, this impa.s.sioned unselfishness strengthened, instead of weakening, his resolution. Heloise was forced to yield, but her instincts saw the dark shadows gathering about them: with sobs and tears she exclaimed, "In the ruin of both of us not less pain is to follow than was the love that came before."

Leaving the child with his aunt the lovers returned to Paris; there they were married in great secrecy, and at once separated. After this they met but seldom, and then with careful precautions against their interviews becoming known. Heloise's family, however, as she had feared, determined to redeem her good name by announcing that Abelard had made her honorable reparation. When people came to her and asked if it was really true that she was the canon's wife, she denied the story angrily.

When her uncle and other relatives contradicted her contradiction, the girl took religion's holiest name in vain, in her a.s.severations that Abelard was not her husband. Fulbert lost all patience, and attempted by cruelty and indignity to drive her to confess the truth. She told Abelard of what she suffered, and one night he contrived to steal her away from her uncle and to carry her back to her old nunnery at Argenteuil, where she a.s.sumed most of the dress of the order, and received only occasional visits from him.

The conjecture that Abelard designed to keep her there, and as soon as his attachment could be weaned to make her take the vows and thus save himself from all further trouble, suggests itself to us to-day: with greater force, it occurred to the people immediately concerned. The rage of the uncle and his friends at Abelard's treachery, first and last, to themselves, and at his heartlessness toward the girl whose worth they understood so well, grew uncontrollable; they bribed a servant to admit them to his house by night, and avenged themselves.

Abelard's spirit was broken, as he saw all hopes of ecclesiastical promotion at an end, and his fame turned to notoriety. Heretofore his public appearances had made the sensation of a king's: "What region did not burn to see you!" asked Heloise. "Who, when you walked abroad, did not hurry to look at you, rising on tiptoe and with straining eyes?" But now every look he fancied scornful.

In this wild age there was always one refuge for the victims of the world or of themselves. To the monasteries flocked all cla.s.ses, from fas.h.i.+onable knights broken down or unsuccessful or weary of conflict, to the half-witted clowns sheltered and utilized as lay-brethren. Husbands forsook their wives, and wives fled from their husbands, to take shelter in the religious life. In this early part of the twelfth century, monastic houses were multiplying like hives of bees, constantly sending out from themselves colonies that quickly became parents of others. For some time the tendency had been to an easier discipline than the traditional, but at last asceticism had blazed out anew, and the rich and luxurious Cluny paled in popularity before Clairveaux or the Grande Chartreuse. In this single century the Cistercians expanded from one abbey to eight hundred, a single one of which is said to have controlled seven hundred benefices. The one meal a day, the hard manual labor, the restricted sleep, the wearisome routine of prayer, reading, and penance, won by their very severity and by the mystical impression of sanct.i.ty and immortal safety which brooded about these retired prisons of self-condemned sin.

"Oh, hide me in your gloom profound, Ye solemn seats of holy pain,"

was the cry with which mult.i.tudes approached the gates that should emanc.i.p.ate them from a freedom which did not satisfy. Ben Jonson's fear lest his inclination to G.o.d might be

"Through weariness of life, not love of thee,"

was realized in the case of numbers of convert.i.tes quite equalling and probably far exceeding those who entered the ascetic orders from the enthusiasm of visionaries. To this retirement, as a screen from the world's curiosity and fancied mocks, Abelard now resolved to withdraw, as his father and mother in their later lives had done before him. His jealousy could not leave Heloise behind, so he told her of his purpose, and hoped that she would volunteer to imitate him. But Heloise made no such offer. In every way hers was a mind beyond her age, and the unnatural harshness of cloistral discipline, its artificial dreariness, its "hope to merit heaven by making earth a h.e.l.l," seemed to her fine insight untrue. Though she had suffered, she was yet in tune with life; her heart a.s.sured her that innocent pleasure is the soul's hymn of praise to G.o.d; bitterly as she shared her husband's misery, she saw no reason for separating her life and his; most of all, she revolted from the notion of professing religion with lip-service only. But Abelard urged, insisted, even commanded, and, seeing it to be his wish, the girl-wife yielded. She told herself that only she was responsible for her husband's afflictions; except for her, his prosperity would have continued undimmed; so the day was fixed on which, in her old nunnery, she should take the vows of perpetual seclusion.

It must have been a strange scene in that chapel at Argenteuil. Abelard was there, still in his habit of a mere secular priest, there to make sure that Heloise's impulses should not burst out again, and cast her back into the world's suns.h.i.+ne. The bishop, attended by his priests, stands at the altar: upon it lies a newly consecrated veil. The nuns, kneeling in their accustomed places, are praying. All wait for the votaress, but she is detained by a crowd of friends. There were many of them there, as Abelard has told us, and they could not endure that this girl, personally so charming, perhaps the most accomplished intellectually of all the women of France, should consummate the sacrifice that she had already in such large measure made. They knew her love for the bright things of life, her beautiful zest for the joyous and sympathetic, her eagerness in study, the grace of her strong, sweet seriousness. Such a nature might be for a time bewildered at the loss of the love of one of the most famous men living, yet if for a little while they could keep her face unhidden by the veil, she might forget. So they delay her outside the chapel, pleading with a heart that has made the same pleas for itself before. Presently the door is pushed open and she enters the oratory, her friends still about her. Even in the sacred place they continue their entreaties, and Abelard's glance is anxiously upon her; but her eyes are downcast. "How they pitied her!" he has told us; "they kept trying to hold back her youth from the yoke of monastic rule, as from punishment intolerable." The bishop seems half pitiful, half impatient; the nuns look up from their praying. Has the world renewed its hold upon her? Will she s.n.a.t.c.h herself from G.o.d? Does he no longer attract her? At this last moment is she hesitating?

She was hesitating; the world did have a hold upon her. G.o.d? G.o.d had never attracted her.

In all the ceremonials of the Catholic Church, there can have been none which has so combined sacrilege with loftiness of feeling as did the scene which followed. From the silent, even wistful hearing that she has been giving to her friends, Heloise suddenly starts away, and, as if waking from a reverie, she moves with dreamy gesture toward her husband.

Her lips part, and what will be her last words as a lady of the world?

Some scriptural exhortation to her friends to follow her as she follows Christ? A cry of exultant renunciation of the wilds of life's ocean, and of contentment at the holy calm in the bosom of the church?

The girl is weeping, and as she tries to control herself to speak, her misery overcomes her, and she bursts into loud sobs. But it must have been surprising to the listening ecclesiastics to hear the words which at last got expression. It is probably the only time in the church's history that a novice has taken her last vows with the prelude of a quotation from a love speech in a pagan poem, directing it not to the bleeding effigy of her present and eternal Master hanging above the altar, but to a human lover at her side. Heloise "broke out as she could between her tears and sobs," in a pa.s.sage from one of the later books of Lucan's _Pharsalia_: surely as she spoke the lines, her voice grew steady, and her eyes looked bravely through the tears:

"Husband and lord, too worthy for my bed, Can Fortune thus cast down so dear a head?

Fated to make thee wretched, why did I Become thy wife? Accept the penalty; I will endure it gladly."

I fancy that Abelard was quite as much impressed by the brilliant young mind that could make so apt and scholarly a quotation from the Roman cla.s.sics, as by the heart which dared on the very margin of the altar to fling back to the world and up to G.o.d this protestation of its unfaltering human love, which took the vows of religion from no other motive than to impose torture upon itself--an offering not to G.o.d, but to Abelard.

As she spoke the verses, she hurried to the altar. _Accipe poenas, quas sponte luam_,--her voice died away, the bishop received her, and covered her forever with the veil.

Heloise was only eighteen.

The convent gates shut in all sight of her for the next ten or eleven years. But in 1130, the nunnery over which she had become prioress was broken up by the unfavorable decision of a suit for the land and buildings which it occupied. This decade had brought abundant misery to Abelard. His heresies in theology had been exposed, and he had been compelled to burn a treasured book in which they were expounded, a council had imprisoned him in an abbey where it was boasted that his haughtiness was tamed by a course of vigorous whipping administered under the abbot's supervision. There is something pitiful in the thought of such physical and mental pride being under the control of fanatical monks, ignorant and coa.r.s.e, from whom he was glad to escape to a desert east of Troyes, as a hermit. He had taught at intervals during these years, and once for a season with a notable renewal of his early success. Near Troyes, where he had built his hermit-shelter out of reeds and stubble, in a desolate region infested by wild animals and a covert for robbers, some vagrant student found the intellectual champion, and reported at Paris his discovery. The news spread, and soon the desert was populous. The students built a house for the master, apparently a commodious one, and about it they made more temporary structures for their own shelter. Not only the younger cla.s.s of scholars besieged him for instruction; older men, ecclesiastics who, as we are told, were wont to grasp instead of giving, paid generously toward constructing a home for the great philosopher. But he was world-weary, and soon retired again to a bleak monastery on the Atlantic, in the lower part of Brittany, where he became abbot of a set of half-barbarous monks, who resented his austere rule and, so he tells us, tried repeatedly to poison him because he interfered with their profligacy. While there he had learned of Heloise's loss of her nunnery, and had established her and her religious sisters in the buildings in Champagne that had been standing unoccupied since he broke up that last school. "The Paraclete,"

he had called the home, as a special invocation to the Holy Spirit and as a tribute for the temporary comfort that he received there. Possibly he himself conducted his wife thither, but it is equally likely that he did not see her after he forced her into the church.

For ten years he appears to have struggled on in Brittany, with no intellectual a.s.sociations, none of the notoriety with which he had been so long pampered, in terror for his life, yet still working at his philosophy of religion. At last he was impelled to talk of what he had endured and was still enduring; to speak in the bitterness of his soul, and get, perhaps, the consolation of pity. He composed a long and immensely interesting autobiography, telling the whole story of his youth, his later triumphs, his logical ac.u.men, his love, his disgrace, the injustice of his condemnation by the conservative church, the tumult of his experiences in the lonely monastery of St. Gildas. The creditable pages are calmly written, the shameful unflinchingly. He tells how tremendous had been his love for Heloise, but he says nothing of loving her still. The narrative reveals an egotist, but it reveals as certainly one of the most striking characters of the Middle Ages.

We find ourselves inevitably speculating upon the life of Heloise during the sixteen or more years whose only recorded event is her removal from Argenteuil to the Paraclete. It might be that a reaction in her love would follow, when the grim captivity that she had dreaded so became yet more hateful in its realization; she might lose her old gentleness; it might become hopeless for her to try to adjust her spirit to its new conditions and to devote herself to even a submissive piety. From contemporary testimony we are sure that some of these possibilities did not come true. She won respect and even devotion as an abbess, her house prospered financially to her husband's undisguised surprise and admiration, her life was pure from the least fleck of reproach, or criticism in any quarter. May we go farther, and say that her spirit did adjust itself to its new conditions, and lose its pain in a submissive piety? For such a result we should find many parallels in mediaeval religion; numerous accounts not to be cavilled at as legendary prove that in these monasteries souls which had suffered found peace. Nay, many a nun among these most refined groups of mediaeval women, driven in one way or another to forsake the hope of love and earthly happiness, secured delight of heart in a sort of spiritual romance. As their emotion grew more subtilized, as asceticism burned away material impulse, some of the gentlest and most poetically endowed of these religious recluses acquired a mystical compensation for their loneliest sacrifice of life,--a divinely idealized personal love, too magical for friends.h.i.+p, too impa.s.sioned and mutual for wors.h.i.+p, where, the s.e.xes mysteriously spiritualized, translated womanhood should rest at last on the breast of Christ. The final vow of religious consecration was the nun's betrothal to the divine man; to make herself beautiful for his bride she wasted her body by fasting and scarred it with the scourge; the rough lath cross on the wall of her cell was his love token; love messages came from him in her dreams; prostrated on the chapel flagging she indited to him prayers that scarcely needed verse to become lyrics.

And when to such a mystic's contemplation the cloister sanct.i.ty seemed too worldly, when her exhausted body found the walk from cell to chapel too long a journey and she was compelled to stay in the coffin that for years of nights had sweetly reminded her of the sure untwining of soul and sense, when she could hear only faintly her sisters' thin chanting of the hours, and felt her spirit quivering with new sensations, vague, awed, and eager, she understood that the waiting time was over, and her espousal at hand. Her failing eyes see white processionals that come to lead her to the banqueting house where the banner of His love shall be over her; the music, which the dying so often hear, for her is a marriage melody ringing from angelic harps and dulcimers; with new-born strength and grace, mantled in new raiment, she floats upward to her desire. And when s.p.a.ce has been traversed the immortal vision bursts upon her, a great poet has put in words her last thought this side heaven:

"He lifts me to the golden doors, The flashes come and go; All heaven bursts her starry floors, And strows her light below, And deepens on and up! the gates Roll back, and far within For me the Heavenly Bridegroom waits, To make me pure of sin.

The sabbaths of Eternity, One sabbath deep and wide,-- A light upon the s.h.i.+ning sea, The Bridegroom with his bride."

But for Heloise there was no such resource. It is to natures more ethereal and const.i.tutionally religious that such fancies and dreams appeal. The main feature of the matured Heloise is sanity and balanced womanhood; she was too strong and intense to be a sentimentalist. Could the nature which had once been caught into the clouds by the whirlwind of love, beguile itself from the memory of that storm of rapture by a visionary tempest raised with a fan? And yet there would be some satisfaction if we could conceive her adjusting herself to the spiritual life with closer accord, and pa.s.sing even through the gates of superst.i.tious hallucination from the harsh religion of her day into the inner sanctuary whose "solemn shadow is better than the sun," finding an outlet for her quick emotions in this personal love for her new Master.

Heloise had been a nun some sixteen years when some one showed her Abelard's so-called _Historia Calamitatum_. Apparently her husband had forbidden her to write to him; but though she had kept a long silence, she was a lover until death. This account of Abelard's sufferings and perils broke her constraint; she could not help writing to comfort him and to beg for news of his safety. What other love-letters equal the intensity, the tenderness, the womanliness of these final appeals for the broken love? Through their nervous pliancy one may learn as nowhere else the reality of Browning's

"Infinite pa.s.sion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn."

In them appears also her strength of nature; they are the love-calls of a woman who knows that the man she continues to set far above all the rest of humanity is wronging her. She chides him for this long and complete neglect, but there is a marvellous sweetness in her caressing reproaches. She tells him to remember under what peculiar bonds she holds him,--what sacred obligation of marriage, of love, and of devotion he owes to her; she gave her honor to please him, not herself; she sacrificed her tender age to the harshness of a monastic life not from piety, but only in submission to his desire. "There was a time," she writes, "when people doubted whether in our amour I yielded to love or to pa.s.sion. But the end shows how I began; to please you, I have denied myself all pleasures." She points out to him how differently the end interprets his feeling for her. "It is common talk," she says, "that you felt only gross emotions toward me, and when there was a stop to their indulgence, your so-called love vanished. My dearest one, would that this appeared to me only, and not to every one; would that I might be soothed by hearing others excuse you, or that I could myself devise excuses."

She appears to entertain no hope that he will visit her, though she hints longingly at the possibility; but he can at least do as much for her as he does for others under obligations so far slighter, as much as the example of the church fathers regarding the women of their flocks teaches him to do,--he can write and tell her how he is, he can comfort her love: or (and she appeals to the monk who may listen, even if the old-time lover will not) he can send spiritual admonition to uphold her slipping soul. Her heart put at rest, she can be so much freer for the divine service. "When you wooed me for the pleasures of earth," she reminds him, "you sent me letter after letter; with many songs you put your Heloise in the speech of all, so that every street and house echoed with me. How much more ought you now to excite toward G.o.d the one whom then you aroused to sin."

She tells him again of her complete absorption in him: "You are the only one who can make me either sad or happy; you only can be my comforter.

The whole world knows how much I loved you," and she turns with a half-shuddering reminiscence to the day she became a nun. "It was for you, not for G.o.d--that sacrifice. From G.o.d I can look for no reward; consider, then, how vain my trial, if by it I win nothing from you"; and the woman for sixteen years a nun calls G.o.d--and remember that hers was the G.o.d of mediaeval superst.i.tion--to witness that she would have followed Abelard, or gone before him, if she had seen him hastening to h.e.l.l.