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I IS- J. 17^
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Bought with the income of
THE KELLER FUND
Bequeathed in Memory of
JasperNewton Keller
Betty Scott Henshaw Keller
Marl\n Mandell Keller
Ralph Henshaw Keller
CarlTilden Keller
PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
^, PORT|LAITS
^AND,
BACKGROUNDa
By
;
EVANGELINE WILBOUR BLASHHELD
HROTSVITHA
APHRA BEHN
AiSSE
ROSALBA CARRIERA
m
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
•-r,r
H \isi. 17
Harvard
UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
COPYRIOBT, igi7. BT
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published November/ 29x7
CONTENTS
rAOB
Hrotsvitha I
I. THE IRON CENTURY 3
n. THE STRONG VOICE OF GANDER8HEIM 8
in. THE8PIS IN SANCTUARY I9
lY. BETWi:.£N TERENCE AND SAINT BENEDICT .... 35
Y. GALUCANU8, AN ESSAY IN HISTORICAL DRAMA . . 43
YI. DULCmUS, A FARCE 5I
yii. callibiachus, a "triangle " play 59
viu. abraham and faphnutius, dramas of sentiment 82
ix. 8apientia9 a tragedy i06
x. theology drabiatized. the muse as doctor i lo
Aphra Behn 113
i. the most ingenious astrea ii5
ii. the education of an author i24
in. FROM GRAY TO GOLD 137
lY. THE ROUT OF COMU8 I49
V. A WOMAN ABOUT TOWN 161
YI. A SECRET AGENT I72
YII. GRUB STREET OR PARNASSUS ? 1 85
Yin. MISTRESS OF REYEL8 I94
IX. THE ROYAL SLAVE 236
X. ON THE SLOPES OF HELICON 259
XI. aphra's last act 272
V
vi CONTENTS
WMt
Aiss£ 285
I. A COUNCIL OF TWO 287
II. A GREEK SLAVE 2^4
III. A KNIGHT OF MALTA 299
•lY. AN IDYL OF THE REGENCY 306
y. AN ILLUMINATION 32O
VI. A CONVERSION 358
VII. A RENUNCIATION 373
ROSALBA CaRRIERA 381
I. A duke's perplexities 383
II. ROSALBA CARRIERA 39I
III. A PROCESSION OF PRINCES 404
IV. PARIS SOJOURN 436
V. THE COURT OF MODENA 453
VI. THE COURT OF VIENNA 462
VII. THE COURT OF ROSALBA 469
HROTSVITHA
«
*Ame passionnee et esprit superieur qui croyait imiter Terence et qui annofifait Racine,"
— ^Philabbts Chasles.
HROTSVITHA
I
"In the tenth century," said Stendhal, "every man wished for two things: first, not to be killed; next, to have a good leathern coat." Such limita- tion of desires implies hard conditions and a stunted development of the human plant. Difficult as it is to assign degrees to misery, in this aptly named "iron" age, when the first millennial period of Christianity was drawing to a close, mankind ap- peared to have attained the confines of its ca- pacity for suffering, and to have entered the low- est infernal circle.
In the cell of the recluse, in the prayer of the ascetic, it was even whispered that the year ten hundred would see the annihilation of the globe. Limited as this belief was, and as powerless to influ- ence action as it had been in the past, material causes for a failure of hope were many. The promise of the Church seemed falsified since its triumph; a decade of Christian centuries had al- most passed away, and where in this blackest of the dark ages were the fruits of Christ's teaching to be found; the peace on earth, the purity of heart, the charity which is the greatest of all virtues ?
3
4 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
In England, harried by the Danish marauders? In the Orient, where Islam, after profaning all the holy places dear to the believer's heart, had become a redoubtable empire? In France, dismembered by the northern sea-thieves ? In Spain, where the Infidel was not only master, but schoolmaster as well? In Germany, at bay between Norse pirates and the new terror from the East, the Huns, for so they were still called in affrighted memory of Attila*s hordes ? It is difficult to realize what potentialities of horror the name implied, for these scarcely hu- man creatures, hissing an unknown tongue, posses- sing no laws of war, no respect for treaties, whirled over the empire like a cloud of locusts, innumerable, ubiquitous, devouring and exterminating with the ruthless, instinctive destructiveness of the famine- spurred insect. While the Teuton was deliberately preparing and arming for defense, they came, they ravaged, and vanished. "You may sooner catch the wind on the plain or the bird in the air," ran the old German proverb. From the shores of the North Sea to the southernmost point of Calabria, havoc and desolation followed in their trail.
If in this unhappy Europe, cowering under the triple scourge of the Norman, the Saracen, and the Hun, the kingdom of heaven was not to be sought in any material sense, the realm of the Church was not less distracted.
Rome presented a strange spectacle. Fortified churches housing mangonels and catapults; rival
HROTSVITHA S
vicars of Christ intrenched respectively in Sant' Angelo and Santa Maria Maggiore, hurling stones and lighted tar-barrels against each other's ad- herents; defeated popes, eyeless, tongueless, nose- less, paraded ignominiously through the Roman streets, though they form picturesque material for the historian, were a sorrow and a scandal to the devout. The contemplation of the softer sins of the supreme pontiffs was equally devoid of edifica- tion. The evicted head of Christendom appro- priating the consecrated vessels and smuggling them off to Constantinople; St. Peter's chair become the couch of dissolute women who bestowed it at their pleasure on their lovers and children; the pope sunk to the position of gentleman-in-waiting to the emperor; successful papal candidates starving, poisoning, and strangling vanquished aspirants to the tiara; such were the sights which a£9icted the pious, and added spiritual wretchedness to the evils of war, famine, and disease.
Penitent sinners, panic-stricken by that expecta- tion of the last judgment which was the concomitant of plague and invasion in every century of the middle ages, sought safety by dowering monasteries, and making oyer their riches to the Church, inscrib- ing the deeds of their donations with the still por- tentous though oft-repeated words, "the end of the world being at hand'' {appropinquante mundi termino).
An iron century truly it seemed in which the clash
6 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
of steel on steel was almost dulled by lamentations; a barren century, too despairing to create, too wretched to dream, hag-ridden by terror; blind even to the perennial magic of the external world, and seeing in the glories of sunset an awful vision of the avenging archangel furrowing the mantling clouds with blood-stained sword.
Thus it is too succinctly labelled by the student toiling through its grewsome annals. Had it no gentler, brighter side? Were the capacities for happiness and usefulness in the individual sterilized by this atmosphere of apprehension and despair ? Art mirrored the surrounding darkness only, but the arts are products of a complicated and gradual evolution; they are deeply rooted in tradition, so dependent on their immediate ancestry that, until they have reached a high degree of technical per- fection, they ofFer but an imperfect image of con- temporaneous thought.
It is to literature, which in its simpler forms is merely a development of daily speech, it is to this comparatively familiar vehicle of expression that we turn for a more exact presentation of the temper of the epoch. As an , exponent of the world-spirit, letters, the more habitual medium, have always distanced the arts. What message do the rude and scanty literary remains of the tenth century bear to us? A threnody, a prediction of oncoming woe ? In Hun-harried Germany, for instance, when the poet-abbot of St. Gall, Ekkehard I, returned
HROTSVITHA 7
to his sacked cloister, desecrated by the heathen enemy, it would be natural to suppose that his poem would be a complaint, an appeal for ven- geance, or a narrative of past suffering. On the contrary, his is a song of triumphant struggle, of young joy in life, as he celebrates the loves, the adventures, and the escape from the Huns of Waltharius and Hildgund, king's children sent as hostages to Attila's court.
Nor is this delight in existence imposed by the antique form. Epic in feeling though not in ma- terial, the Latin hexameters are wholly informed with the Teutonic spirit, which frequently discomposes the stately, borrowed toga. Here is no cloister- garden sheltered from the storm, but the wind- scourged forests of the young world.
These royal fugitives are high-hearted, meeting peril blithely, and are prudent as well, carrying away a handsome portion of Hunnish loot in their flight. Waltharius is the Northern lover; tender but prac- tical, foreseeing about the commissariat, and almost frigidly respectful to his betrothed. Hildgund is a companion for heroes; intrepid, tranquil, and sub- missive, with the innocent heart of Gretchen under the broad breast of a walkyr. But where in this spirited, though crude narrative of Titanic fights, and weighty blows alternating with jests as ponder- ous, is there any stain of fear or gloom ? On the contrary, it breathes a boisterous joy and resounds with heroic laughter. So much for one of the strong
8 PORTRAITS' AND BACKGROUNDS
voices of the century, and for literature as an echo of contemporary feeling.
Ekkehardy however, had been a soldier; he may still have felt in his veins the fine glow of the notable victory over the Huns to which he and his fellow- monks nobly contributed. The elation of triumph may have lent him a brief buoyancy of spirit. His work may not be typical, it may even be the excep- tion that throws the prevailing spirit into even stronger relief. The convent may yield us what the monastery denied. The soprano voice is more poignant in lamentation, and the minor key, we are told, is that instinctively employed by women; perhaps the sorrow of the century found utterance through some wailing woman mourning for griefs not her own.
The only feminine voice which was heard above the din was that of a Benedictine nun. If in thought we penetrate to the cell of the poetess Hrotsvitha in the abbey of Gandersheim, do we at last discover the Pythia of the tenth century, the mouthpiece of its misery ? No, for this cloistered maiden, with Terence open before her and her Virgil close at hand, is writing comedies for her sister nuns to act.
II
Though she cannot be utilized to buttress a theory^ Hrotsvitha is a puzzling phenomenon well worth study. With the perversity of her sex, she flatly
HROTSVITHA 9
contradicts all our preconceived notions of the period she adorned. A nun of the strict Benedictine order, she sacrificed to Thalia and laid the thyrsus on the altar. A woman of the darkest of the dark ages, she pored over the Pagan poets, and knew her Terence as well as she did Boethius, or the New Testament. A consecrated virgin, she did not shrink from depicting forceful* sceneis of passion. A recluse, her work betrays an intimate knowledge of the world and a tone of urbanity which indicates an advanced stage in the evolution of social life.
Her plays were the product of a professionally religious person, writing for a devout public and for pious actresses; they were dramatizations of well- known sacred legends, and they were composed with the avowed moral purpose of luring the nuns from the seductive study of the Latin love-comedies. Yet their spirit is not distinctly ecclesiastical, and nothing is more charming than the timid revelations of personality that the comedies betray; the high breeding of the lady; the woman's tenderness pro- testing against the sternness of the Law. If she called upon her auditors to repent, it was jubilantly rather than dolefully; if she preached, it was by the edifying example set by her characters, not only by didactic precept; she rarely scourged sinners, but preferred to convert them, and against evil- doers she directed the characteristically modern weapon, ridicule. Far from bewailing the vile- ness of earth or prophesying future ill, the infinite
lo PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
mercy of God was her constant theme. In an age of pious donations and fear-extorted endowments, she asserted more than once, before an audience of churchmen, that offerings of ill-gotten treasure were unpleasing to the Divinity.
In short, an examination of her work (which dates from more than a hundred years before the battle of Hastings) gives the lie direct to the popular con- ception of the tenth century that had been duly docketed and pushed into a convenient pigeon- hole, marked *' barbarous," and tacitly urges the narrower scrutiny of a period which has seemed swathed in darkness and gloom.
We have little knowledge of the life of the play- wright who has brought us so near to the life of her time, not even the date of her birth or of her death. It is only from her dedicatory epistles that a few sparse biographical details can be gathered, and these are sufficiently vague to lend countenance to several ingenious theories and consequent contro- versies.
On her name which she herself in the unique MS. of Munich writes Hrotsvitha, some eighteen changes have been wrung from Seidel's fantastic '* Helena of Rossow" to Gottshed's "White Rose." Her work has been confused with that of the English poetess Hilda Heresvida; she has been arbitrarily relegated to the ninth century, and made a contemporary of Pope Joan. It was reserved, however, for modem scholarship to deny her existence. Professor Asch-
HROTSVITHA ii
bach, in what seems to the unlearned a playful mood, asserted that there never was any such per- son as Hrotsvitha; that Conrad Celtes, the Renais- sance humanist who discovered her works, had, with the assistance of some twenty learned friends, written them, and had then forged this MS. in the Ratisbon monastery; that the secret, known to so many, had been devoutly kept; that Willibald Pirkheimer had composed his eulogy on the fictive author to help out the hoax; and that this elab- orate deception had been planned and executed to justify the correspondence of Celtes with Pirkheimer's sister Caritas, a learned Franciscan nun!
Professor Aschbach's fanciful and ingenious trea- tise raised a controversial breeze that stirred the dust in many studies. The suggestions, however plausible, were unfortified by a single proof, or any fragment of positive evidence. The author has been contented to present conjecture in place of argument and to trust in his intuitions. He felt "a masculine spirit" in the work, and the style was too elegant, the Latin too good to be the product of a woman of the rustic tenth century. Like much unpondered, destructive criticism, these un- supported assumptions did not lack believers, and how readily a baseless theory is regarded as a proven fact was illustrated by Querard's naive acceptance of Aschbach's treatise in the ** Super- chtries litteraires.^*
12 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
German erudition received it less kindly. Pens were drawn and ink spilt in defense of *^die alUste deutsche Dichterin.'' The consequences of much controversy were the critical scrutiny of the MS., which established its authenticity as a genuine document of the tenth century beyond a doubt; a meticulous examination of its language and style resulted in a general consensus of authorities that Hrotsvitha was a substantial personality that the most rigid inquiry could not dissipate, but on the contrary had solidly confirmed, and that no amount of spectacled research could resolve into air like that charming phantasm, Clotilde de Surville.
It is the authoress herself who supplies us with the rare data from which a faint outline of her biography may be traced. She informs us (with that obscurity of statement which usually envelops similar dates) that she came into the world long after the death of Otho the Illustrious, father of Henry the Fowler (912); and again in the preface to the legends she writes of herself as a little older than the daughter of Henry, Duke of Bavaria, Gerberga II. This Gerberga was consecrated abbess of Gandersheim in 959. As her parents were mar- ried in 938 and she was their eldest daughter, her birth may be approximately dated two years later (940). Hrotsvitha, then, was born probably be- tween 930 and 935. The date of her death is more uncertain. She was alive and writing the history of her convent in Latin verse thirty-five
HROTSVITHA 13
years later, and if a chronicler of the bishops of Hildesheim is to be believed, she saw the beginning of the eleventh century.
Of her life in the world there is no record in her works save the inferences to be drawn from her familiarity with the usages of courtly society and her knowledge of the heart. In the province of the emotions, the girl who embraced the religious life at the age of twenty-three had little to learn, per- haps much to remember. Soon after Hrotsvitha entered the convent, Gerberga II became abbess of Gandersheim. This daughter of the Caesars, who preferred the veil to the imperial crown, was true to the traditions of education which were a heritage from the great Charles, and to which the marriage of the Emperor Otho I with a Greek princess added a tincture of Hellenic culture.
It was under the new abbess's tuition and that of an accomplished nun, Rikkarde, that Hrotsvitha pursued the theological and literary studies which she had already begun in the world. In the re- ligious houses under Benedictine rule a learned brother, the ScholasticuSj directed the education of the monks; perhaps Rikkarde filled the same office in the community of Gandersheim, which was no refuge for idle women gabbling empty prayers and dreaming away the long, leaden afternoons, but a sanctuary of piety and erudition from its founda- tion. Its traditions were aristocratic, even imperial, its founder no less a personage than Ludolf, Duke
14 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
of Saxony, grandnephew of Witikind. The site first chosen for the convent was Brunshausen, but it was soon transferred to the banks of the river Ganda, where the town of Gandersheim grew up around the abbey.
Ludolf did not live to see his work finished, but the gifts and personal supervision of his Prankish wife, Oda, were freely given to the establishment of the new religious house, whither she herself retired in 88 1, to seek the peace which, in that turbulent age, only the cloister could bestow. Her three daughters, Hathumoda, Gerberga, and Christina, became abbesses of Gandersheim, each in her turn. The period of their sway was a comparatively brief one; monastic life was unfavorable to the longevity of those who entered it in their springtime.
The literary history of the convent dates from the death of Hathumoda (874). It was then the custom at the funerals of illustrious or nobly bom persons to recite or even to improvise a dramatic dialogue, in which eulogy was mingled with per- sonal reminiscences of the dead. The vocero of the Corsicans, and the moving lamentation of the Cop- tic wailing women, whose melancholy office is to deepen the sorrow of the mourners, are modem sur- vivals of these mediaeval plaints. The abbess's brother Wichbert, Bishop of Hildesheim, who came to bury Hathumoda and to praise her, composed the funeral drama, in which, under the name of Agius, he filled the principal role. Fratemal love
HROTSVITHA 15
and tender memories of home and childhood find expression in this poem, which time has spared.
Hrotsvitha, fourth abbess of Gandersheim, suc- ceeded to the last of the three sisters (903). This learned lady has often been mistaken for the more famous playwright of the same name; a pardonable confusion, since the abbess was also an author and continued the literary traditions of the convent. She excelled in rhetoric and logic, and though her treatise on the latter has not yet been discovered, modem criticism has assigned to her the ''Lives of St. Willibald and St. Wunnibald." Her most noteworthy performance, though connected with a MS., was not in the realm of letters. By her skill in dialectics she managed to outargue the Devil and wrest from him a pact in which a short- sighted young man had signed away his soul, which incident, while proving the advantages accruing from the study of logic, redounded to the great honor of the abbey.
The convent was secularized in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Of its many buildings the fine Romanesque church alone remains. The rest of the cloister has probably furnished materials for the pretty, picturesque houses that line the nar- row streets of Gandersheim, houses in whose walls are set bits of Byzantine and Romanesque orna- ment: disks, cords, and palms, relics of the heroic age of the sleepy little modem town. But though not a new building is to be seen in the long curve
i6 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
that leads from the convent church to St. George's, there is nothing left of Hrotsvitha's day but these fragments of sculptured stone. The Romanesque abbey-church founded by Ludolf and his Prankish wife Oda (853) is gaunt and bleak; its bare, pale- tinted interior is curiously enlivened by an elaborate eighteenth-century wooden tomb in white and gold of two great ladies who were abbesses here, remote successors of Hathumoda and Gerberga. To be- come one many quarterings were required, for the abbess of Gandersheim was also a prince, "Furstabtin,** with the right to a seat in the Diet. Hence the inscriptions, escutcheons, and lists of honors and titles on tombal slabs in memory of these petticoated "prince-abbots" that read like pages from the Almanach de Gothoy and form the only decoration of the church walls. Evidently pride had become a cardinal virtue instead of a deadly sin when in an orgy of ostentation crown- bearing and weeping angels, flower-pots, family trees, tilting helmets, coats of arms, inscriptions in medallions, portraits in oval frames, cupids with skull and trumpet, gilded columns wreathed with green leaves were piled up in the boudoir-tomb of the abbesses Maria Elizabeth and her sister Chris- tine. Coming to Gandersheim with the hope of discovering some trace of "the St.-Cyr of the middle ages," Hrotsvitha's convent, and of the learned princesses who ruled over it, and find-
HROTSVITHA 17
ing in their grim old church this frivolous Rigence monument was one of the many surprises of travel.
But the gray church towers, the huddle of roofs around them, the dark folds of the wooded foothills of the Harz Mountains, the gentle dip of the valley, the cloister church of Brunshausen among the trees, the forest everywhere encroaching on town and meadow, is to-day much what it was when Hrotsvitha looked out from her convent window at the world she had renounced.
It was, however, more than half a century after the consecrarion of the abbess Hrotsvitha that her famous namesake began to surpass her teachers, the noble Gerberga and the wise Rikkarde, and to pursue a new method of self-expression. The dedications prefixed to her various works record the successive steps of her ascent of Parnassus. The preface to her first poems, the l^ends in verse, is the apologia of the novice. In the elegiac verses which precede the "History of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin** she beseeches the divine Mother to loosen her tongue and quotes the ex- ample of Balaam's ass to whom God deigned to accord the gift of speech. The well-known modesty of young authors has seldom found a more felicitous comparison. She pleads for the reader's indul- gence for her mistakes in prosody and syntax, and entreats you to bear with her, remembering the
i8 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
remoteness of the cloister, the weakness of her sex, and her age, still far from mature. She has no other aim in writing than to prevent the slender portion of genius which heaven bestowed on her from stagnating in her bosom and rusting there through her negligence. She desires "to force it, under the hammer of devotion, to emit a feeble sound in God's praise/'
In the "Epistle to Certain Learned Persons," an introduction to the comedies, which followed the legends in verse, the tone is more assured. The writer here addresses a larger circle of erudite and eminent men. "Bowed down like a reed," as she vividly describes herself, her language never- theless discloses a laudable desire to remain humble in the midst of plaudits, rather than the self-distrust and timidity of a tyro. Hrotsvitha has conquered success, she appeals to an enlightened public which supplies her with judicious criticism and stimu- lating eulogy; she has come into her own, and if in her later poem, the **Panegyris Oddonum^** the same tone of elaborate self-depreciation persists, it may be accepted as a convention. In Hrots- vitha's day a woman who handled a pen felt more obliged to apologize for her occupation than she who wielded a sword. In letters she still cowered be- hind the shield of her sex.
Hrotsvitha's last work, of which the original MS. has disappeared, is a poem, or rather a portion of a poem on the foundation of the convent of
HROTSVITHA 19
Gandersheim. Both this and the ** Panegyric of the Othos'' afford precious data to the historian of the middle ages.
Ill
The comedies are, however, the most noteworthy of her productions. Not only are they the most personal in handling, the most abounding in human interest, but they possess a positive value for the student of manners, are enticingly suggestive to the psychologist, and form a unique document for the historian of the stage — a unique document, although the French humanist, Jean Prot, who prepared the MS. of **Pamphilus De A more** for publication in the fifteenth century, called this anonymous Latin poem a comedy, and although some modem scholars have considered it a work of the tenth century. For as it could not be acted on any stage, even that of a theatre libre, "Pamphilus" cannot be considered a play. The nature of the subject-matter prohibits dramatic representation. *' Pamphilus '' is also entirely Pagan in form and feeling; its characters — ^the lover, the maiden, the old woman — are part of the common stock of Greek and Latin poets; they are unbaptized and unre- generate heathen. The poem is a frank imitation of antique models, especially of Ovid's ^^ Amores^* and of an idyl doubtfully attributed to Theocritus. Ex- cept in language, ''Pamphilus" shows no trace of the century to which it has been ascribed.
20 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
In the long darkness which extended from the extinction of the classical drama to the rise of the mediaeval miracle-play> Hrotsvitha's dramas pre- sent a single luminous point. Aided by the light of this spark of the sacred fire, snatched from the altar of Dionysos to illumine a Christian shrine, the new drama is revealed lying in the lap of the old, and the link between the comedy of Terence and the comedy of Shakespeare is recovered. Though it had no immediate following, Hrotsvitha's work is of the new, the modern epoch, for it shows the form the Latin drama assumes in Teutonic hands, and in the service of the new ideal.
It becomes narrative and didactic; it is no longer a comedy of movement and of manners like that of Plautus, nor of situations and poetic declamation like the work of Terence. It seeks to become ethical like the drama of Greece. It only succeeds in draw- ing morals and defining dogmas, but its intention is to teach a lesson. The Northern spirit has brooded over it until the old, light-hearted Latin play, whose mission was to divert and to amuse, turns Puritan, intones canticles, prays, and preaches — preaches always even in the house of Thais. Northern, too, is its jumble of the pathetic and the comic, of the fanciful, the grotesque, and the tragic; Dulcitius's sooty face moves us to mirth even while we fear for the persecuted maidens, and- who can refrain from smiling at Julian's ironical application of the text: "Whosoever he be of you
. HROTSVITHA it
who forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple." Even scenes of martyrdom are re- lieved by touches of heavy-handed Teutonic hu- mor, and a frolic spirit frisks through her drear- iest digressions. It is the rough new wine of a younger race, of a more childlike faith, that Hrots- vitha pours into the old amphora, and the shapely vessel is fractured by the stir and ferment of the spirit within.
The narrative, as opposed to the purely dramatic form of the antique drama, was perforce imposed upon Hrotsvitha and the Elizabethan playwrights by the nature of their material. Dramatized legends and tales cannot present the swiftness of movement, the spontaneity of action, the prompt exposition of motive which the play originally conceived as a play possesses. In the acted legend, in the arranged novella, there are languors, hiatuses, violations of the unities, suspensions of interest which would try the patience of a Latin audience. Not so the more stolid Teuton or ruminant Anglo-Saxon. He wanted plenty of time, he expected to be edified as well as delighted; he liked to be sermonized. The very completeness of the antique play would have dissatisfied him, for it left his imagination unem- ployed. He had no love of art for art's sake, of beautiful words and delicate phrasing. He was intent on the thought conveyed by the diction, not on elegance of style. Later under the genial influ- ence of the Pagan renaissance, significance was
22 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
I
I
I
mated with beauty, but Hrotsvitha and her con- temporaries considered art primarily as a vehicle for edification. Therefore she followed the monkish legends quite loyally, using the original dialogue whenever she could and only infringing upon their formal lines occasionally by some tender or delicate touch of feeling, some fiery outburst of passion that vivified and humanized her pious lay figures, either supernaturally holy and pure, or unnaturally vile and base.
It was not only her knowledge of the emorions that saved Hrotsvitha from servile imitation of her models, it was a feeling for essentials; a striving after a general effect that prompted her to select, to abridge, to develop, to concentrate her material as well as to add to it that indescribable quality which the wise Latins assigned to the feminine gen- der, grace.
The comedies are not liturgic in character; they are not Miracle-Plays or Mysteries. They have |
nothing in common with the religious drama of the middle ages, with such representations as ''The Wise and Foolish Virgins,*' for instance, which is their contemporary. Compared to the "Massacre of the Innocents " with its chants and processions, Hrotsvitha's plays are secular, worldly affairs. They differ utterly from the performances, part pantomime, part pageant, part oratorio, a kind of religious opera, which were given in the churches at Easter and Christmas. In a word, Hrotsvitha's
HROTSVITHA 23
comedies are, in spite of their archaic subject- matter, comedies of manners. The scenes may be laid in the palace of Diocletian, or in the Nitrian desert, but the dramatis personct are the author's contemporaries; their thoughts are those of Ger- mans of the tenth century, and into them Hrots- vitha has breathed the soul of her age, their speech behind its antique mask is of her time; it is thus that her fellows argued, and preached and pleaded.
The scene between Tartufe and Elmire is not more alien to the spirit of antique comedy on the one hand, or to the form and intention of the "Mys- tery" on the other, than is the dialogue between Dnisiana and Callimachus; the colloquy between Paphnutius and the abbess to whom he confides his penitent is a good example of an exchange of mediaeval courtesies; the jargon with which Sa- pientia bejuggles the long-suffering Hadrian is the vernacular of the schoolmen of the tenth century of whom Paphnutius, when he flits from one proposi- tion to another, like a verbal will-o'-the-wisp before his dazed disciples, is a well-drawn type. The characters are not abstractions, frigid personifica- tions' of virtues and vices, like the Fellowship and Good Deeds of "Everyman," but human beings, not subtly differentiated, it is true, but firmly and clearly drawn in the slight outlines furnished by tradition.
Callimachus, Duldtius, Fortunatus, are the fore- runners of the lovers, villains, and traitors of the
24 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
Elizabethan drama. Their like does not exist in the comedy of the ancients; we should search in vain for their counterparts among the cheats and rogues of Terence and Plautus.^ More modern still, further removed from the shy and helpless girls, the Phileniums and Antiphilas, of the Latin plays, are the dauntless and argumentative maidens of Hrotsvitha. G>mpare the Mary and Thais of the Christian playwright with Terence's hftairai, the kind-hearted and sweet-tempered Chrysis and Bac- chis. They are inhabitants of different moral plan- ets. The former have souls to be saved, consciences to be awakened; their Pagan sisters have but soft hearts, inclined to love and pity. Their amiability is instinctive like that of some gentle animal, they are not oppressed by any sense of spiritual degra- dation; unhaunted by the consciousness of evil- doing, they feel no moral chasm between them- selves and the innocent girls they befriend. It is not of such stuff that saints are made. The char- acter of Drusiana shows as clearly the modifications the new faith brought to the old type. Her con- ception of duty is not. more foreign to that of the Roman wife than are the modest evasions with which she repels her would-be lover's advances to the dignified frankness of the matron of antiquity. Slightly sketched as she is, Drusiana is more akin to Clarissa Harlowe than to the Alcmena or the Alcestis of classical drama. Modem terms applied to Hrotsvitha's playa
HROTSVITHA 25
possess of course only a relative value, and are perhaps misleading. Her dramatis personce are treated much as the disciples of Giotto painted their figures: in flat tints, simply outlined. She is a "Primitive" artist and yet in writing of her work as in considering the productions of early Italian painters, one uses perforce the vocabulary which . has grown out of a knowledge of perfected processes.
The action of the comedies is lively; the scenes change as constantly as on the English stage in the sixteenth century, and the unities are as blithely ignored; twenty years elapse between the second and third acts of "Abraham" for instance. The license of the Romantic drama was attained at one leap by Hrotsvitha who broke the leading strings of classical tradition at once, and in her first play.
The comedies were naturally written in Latin, which was then not only the tongue of the wise, but of the polite; it was the language of courts, ecclesiastical and secular; the slender bridge span- ning a dark gulf of barbarism, by which the singer or the scholar attained the luminous, golden realm of old-world poetry and learning. The plays are written in prose because in the tenth centuiy the verse of Terence was considered to be prose, but Hrotsvitha's prose, as Philarete Chasles has pointed out, is rhythmic and balanced, and when read with close attention a constant assonance is discovered in it, which divides the sentences sometimes into
26 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
two, again into three, unequal parts. The variety and vivacity of the dialogue interrupt this regular cadence, but as soon as the phrases acquire a cer- tain degree of extension, the rhyme obstinately reappears. This assonance is concealed by the form of the sentences, but when they are properly spaced it is obvious enough; for example, in this citation from "Abraham," rearranged by Chasles:
Abraham
Hei mihif o bone Jesu! Quid hoc monstri Est quod hanCy quam tibi sponsam nutrivif Alienos amatores audio sequi?
Amicus
Hoc meretricibus antiquitus fuit in more, Ut alieno delectarentur in amore?
Abraham
Affer mihi sonipedem delicatum
Et militarem habituniy Quo deposito tegmine religionis
Ipsam adeain sub specie amatorist
Chasles, convinced that Hrotsvitha had per- fected for her own use the means of expression, half classical, half barbarian, which she found ready to hand, considers her as a precursor of the modern poet, and Ebert finds in the habitual use of dimin- utives and a certain caressing sweetness in the verse, a winning betrayal of the writer's sex.
In any case the plays, whether written in free verses of all kinds of feet, or in prose, sometimes
HROTSVITHA 27
sonorous and cadenced, sometimes staccato an<i tripping, are not wanting in style or in terseness (a rare quality in the middle ages), probably due to loving study of the concise elegance of the seductive poet whom Hrotsvitha hoped to supersede. But though she might say of Terence as Dante did of Virgil:
** Tu ducay tu maestfOy e tu signore**
she was moved by the greater master; indeed her convent-garden is fragrant with many grafts from antique groves, and the spiritual spouse of Christ was a child of the Pagan poets as well.
Hrotsvitha did not herself call her dramas come- dies. A later hand than hers (Magnan believes it to have been that of Conrad Celtes) wrote "Pr^- JoLio in Comcedias** over the introduction to the plays in the Munich MS. Readers of the Divine Comedy hardly need to be reminded that the term was an elastic and complicated one in the middle ages, and that it was more often applied to an epic narrative than to a dialogue. ^'A poetic tale beginning in horrors and ending in joy, and using lowly language, while tragedy commences tran- quilly and ends in horror and uses lofty language"; thus Dante defines comedy in a letter to Can Grande.
The unique MS. of Hrotsvitha's works after re- maining for centuries in the Benedictine monastery of St. Emmeran, at Ratisbon, was in 1803 brought to Munich and placed in the Royal Library where
28 PORTRAITS AND BACKGROUNDS
it still remains. The binding is of undressed brown leather; the ornaments and clasps have been torn from it; probably they were of intrinsic and artistic value, for in Hildesheim Hrotsvitha's bishop, Bern- ward, himself a painter and metal-worker, had founded a famous school of goldsmiths. The MS. is well written, though undecorated save by rubri- cated initial letters and small circular ornaments in red and black ink on the margins.
There is no spacing or paragraphing, no division of the plays into scenes, and the speeches of the different characters are indicated by an initial only after the name has been written out once. The titles of the comedies were added in script during the Renaissance at the tops