Mimesis (44 page)

La Sale, then, remains unaffected by the movement which led the great Italian authors of the fourteenth century to extend their domain over all of contemporary reality. His language and his art in general are class-determined; his horizon is narrow, although he has traveled so widely. Wherever he went, he saw many notable things, but all he ever noted in them was their courtly and knightly aspect. The
Réconfort
too is written in this spirit. But in the midst of its late feudal and already somewhat brittle stylistic pomp, there appears—as the text quoted above shows—a truly tragic occurrence of the highest dignity, which is narrated a little ceremoniously and circumstantially, it may be, but yet with great warmth and simplicity of feeling, as the subject deserves. In medieval literature there is hardly another instance of so simple, so extremely real, so exemplarily tragic a conflict, and I have often wondered why this beautiful passage is so little known. The conflict is completely unschematized; it has nothing to
do with any of the traditional motifs of courtly literature. It involves a woman, but a mother and not a mistress. It is not romantically moving, like the story of Griselda, but a piece of practical, graspable reality. The background of knightly ceremonial does not interfere with its simple grandeur, for one is ready to grant without argument that a woman, especially in this era, conforms to prevailing conditions. Indeed, Madame du Chastel’s submissiveness, her humility, her obedient bowing to her husband’s will, show only the more impressively the sterling force and freedom of her nature as it awakes in a time of need. In the last analysis the conflict concerns her alone; for although he shows himself undecided and complains, there is no doubt as to what decision he must make. But it depends on her attitude whether and how he can withstand the shock. And in a quick and clear acceptance of the situation she regains control over herself through the argument:
se il se muert, or as-tu bien tout perdu
. And she forthwith resolves to extricate him from his useless self-torture, to show him the road she knows he must take, by taking it before him. As soon as she has succeeded in attracting his attention, she first gives him what he most urgently needs, that is, order in his thoughts, consciousness of the problem he must solve: there is a decision to be made between two evils, and he must choose the lesser. When, still helpless, he asks which is the lesser, she at first avoids answering the question: that, she says, is not to be decided by a frail woman but by a man’s virtue and courage. She thus puts him under the necessity of as it were ordering her to express her views, which means that she reinstates him, albeit only outwardly, in his accustomed position of leadership and responsibility. By this very fact she has extricated him from the state of spineless querulousness which was undermining his strength and his self-respect. And then she sets the example he must follow. Children, she says, are more the children of their mothers, who carried them and gave birth to them and suckled them, than of their fathers. Our son is more my son than yours; and yet I now renounce all my love of him as though I had never had him; I sacrifice my love for him; for we can have other children, but if your honor is lost, it cannot be recovered. And if you follow my advice, people will praise you:
c’est le preudomme et très loyal chevalier
. … It is hard to decide what is most praiseworthy in this speech, its self-effacement or its self-control, its goodness or its clarity. That a woman under such a trial does not abandon herself to her grief but sees the situation clearly as it really is; that she understands there can be no question of surrendering the
fortress and that hence the boy is lost in any case if the Prince is in earnest; that she manages by her intervention to restore her husband’s inner poise, by her example to give him the courage to make a decision, and even, by her reference to the fame he will gain, to offer him some measure of consolation and most certainly to give him back the pride and self-respect which will make it easier for him to play the part assigned to him—all this has a simple beauty and grandeur which can vie with any classical text. Very beautiful too is the conclusion when, released from his tension, he can pray again, and thank her, and even ask her to rest a little longer:
Reposer, dist-elle, hellas, Monseigneur, je n’ay cuer, oeul, ne membre sur mon corps qui en soit d’accord. …

It is apparent that the late-feudal epideictic style is able to produce a visual representation of such a genuinely tragic and genuinely real scene. However superficial this style may be in political and military matters, whose true relations and causal connections it no longer grasps, it stands the test in a perfectly simple, directly human action. This is the more remarkable since in our case the place of the action is extremely everyday and domestic, the personages are a married couple, talking over their troubles at night in bed. In the classical conception of the ancients this is no proper setting for a tragic action in the elevated style. Here the tragic, the grave, the problematic appears in the everyday life of a family. And although the people involved belong to the high nobility and are steeped in feudal forms and traditions, the situation in which we find them—in bed at night, not as lovers but as man and wife, grieving under dire stress, and intent upon helping one another—is of a kind that impresses us more as middle-class, or rather as generally human, than as feudal. Despite the solemn and ceremonious language, what takes place is very simple and very naive. A few simple thoughts and emotions appear, in harmony or in conflict. There is no question of any stylistic separation between the tragic and everyday realism. During its heyday, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, French courtly literature produced nothing so real and “creatural.”
¹
A married couple in bed—that might at least have occurred in a popular farce. And what can we say about the representation of the weeping and lamenting boy as he is led to his death! I shall not praise it. It is unnecessary, either for the reader or for the unfortunate father (to whom the herald’s report is addressed), that the minute details of the occurrence should be depicted with so much sensory
evidence. The more striking is it that so large a measure of unconcealed creatural realism can be united with a tragic event in this style of heraldic ostentation. Everything is calculated to bring out in visual clarity the contrast between the innocence of the boy and the gruesome execution, between the protected life he has so far led and the merciless reality which suddenly breaks in on it: the pity of the guards, who have made friends with the boy during his brief detention as a hostage; his childish, uncomprehending outpouring of lamentation, twice heard, in which, saying the same words over and over, he clings to every present and absent source of help; his struggling against death to the very last moment, despite the consoling words of the monk who hears his confession, until his desperate resistance makes the fetters wear the flesh of his legs to the bone. … The Seigneur du Chastel is spared nothing, nor is the reader.

What we have observed here, this interplay between the epideictic style of knightly ceremony and a starkly creatural realism which does not shun but actually savors crass effects, is not a new discovery of ours. From the romantic period on, this combination has been an integral part of the current concept of the Middle Ages. More exact research has established that it was at the end of the Middle Ages—during the fourteenth and especially the fifteenth century—that the combination evolved and became strikingly and characteristically apparent. For more than thirty years now, we have had an excellent and widely-known study of this epoch, Huizinga’s
The Waning of the Middle Ages
, in which the phenomenon is repeatedly analyzed in various contexts. What is common to the two elements and holds them together is certain factors in the sensory taste of the period: ponderousness and somberness, dragging tempo, strongly charged coloration. As a result its epideictic style often has a somewhat exaggerated sensory impressiveness; its realism often has a certain ponderousness of form and at the same time something directly creatural and fraught with tradition. Many realistic forms—the Dance of Death for example—have the character of processions or parades. The traditionalism of the serious, creatural realism of this period is explained by its origin. It stems from Christian figuralism and takes almost all its intellectual and artistic motifs from the Christian tradition. The suffering creature is present to it in the Passion of Christ, the portrayal of which becomes more and more brutal while its sensory and mystic power of suggestion grows stronger, or in the passions of the martyrs. Domestic intimacy and “serious”
intérieur
(“serious” in comparison
with the
intérieur
of the farces) it derives from the Annunciation and other domestic scenes which were to be found in Scripture. In the fifteenth century the embedding of the events of the story of salvation in the contemporary daily life of the people had reached such a pitch, and their minutest details had become so penetrated with typology, that religious realism exhibits symptoms of excess and crude degeneracy. We have mentioned this fact in an earlier passage (pp. 158ff.); it has often been observed, very clearly and with great penetration by Huizinga for example, so that we need not go into it further. Yet in our context some other points must be made in regard to the realism of the closing Middle Ages. And the first is that the picture of man living in reality which the Christian mixture of styles had produced—that is, the creatural picture—begins likewise to appear outside of the Christian sphere in its more restricted sense. We find it in our narrative, which relates a feudal and military occurrence. Then we must point out that the representation of real contemporary life now turns with particular care and great art to the intimate, domestic, and everyday detail of family life. This too, as we have just observed, results from the Christian mixture of styles; it is a development for which the conceptual patterns are to be found in the motifs connected with the Virgin Mary’s and Christ’s birth. It exhibits, especially in the domain of the visual arts, far more allusions of a typological nature than was assumed until recently.

But the development was also furthered by the rise of the upper-bourgeois culture which made itself strongly felt toward the end of the Middle Ages especially in northern France and Burgundy. This culture was not, it is true, quite conscious of itself (it was a long time before the “third estate” was given a place in theory which corresponded with the actual situation); in its attitudes and its style of life it long remained, despite its considerable wealth and growing power, a lower rather than an upper bourgeoisie. But it supplied motifs for the mimetic arts, motifs which were precisely of the intimately domestic variety—both as picturesque
intérieur
and as representing domestic and economic conditions and problems. The domestic, intimate, and everyday aspects of personal life sometimes come through even in cases involving members of the feudal nobility or of the princely class. Here too we find that intimate occurrences are represented much more often, in greater detail, and more plainly than before—as is the case in our text and frequently also in the writings of the chroniclers (Froissart, Chastellain, etc.). Hence literature and
art, despite their predilection for feudal and heraldic display, have on the whole a much more bourgeois character than was true in the earlier Middle Ages. And finally a third point must be stressed as being of essential importance for late medieval realism—the very point which induced me to employ in this chapter the new term “creatural.” It is characteristic of Christian anthropology from its beginnings that it emphasizes man’s subjection to suffering and transitoriness. This was a necessary concomitant of the idea of Christ’s Passion as part of the story of salvation. Yet during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the corresponding devaluation and denigration of earthly existence had not reached the extreme which characterizes the era here under discussion. During the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages the idea that life on earth has value and purpose was still very much alive. Human society had specific tasks to accomplish; it had to realize a specific ideal form on earth in order to prepare men for the Kingdom of God. Within the confines of the present study, Dante is an example of a man for whom (as for many of his contemporaries) secular planning and political endeavor on the part of individuals and human society at large was highly significant, ethically relevant, and decisive for eternal salvation. It may be that the social ideals of those early centuries had lost in power and prestige because events so stubbornly gave them the lie and that new developments were initiated which were in no way compatible with them. It may be that people did not know how to interpret and organize the new political and economic forms of life which were being initiated, or again that the will to a theoretical comprehension of practical earthly life was paralyzed by the various trends toward a popular ecstaticism, by the ever more emotionally realistic mysticism of the Passion, and the prevailing form of piety which was increasingly degenerating into superstition and fetishism. Certain it is that during the last centuries of the Middle Ages there are to be observed symptoms of fatigue and barrenness in constructive-theoretical thinking, especially insofar as it is concerned with the practical organization of life on earth, with the result that the “creatural” aspect of Christian anthropology—life’s subjection to suffering and transitoriness—comes out in crass and unmitigated relief. The peculiar feature of this radically creatural picture of man, which is in particularly sharp contrast to the classico-humanistic picture, lies in the fact that it combines the highest respect for man’s class insignia with no respect whatever for man himself as soon as he is divested of them. Beneath them there is nothing but the flesh, which age and
illness will ravage until death and putrefaction destroy it. It is, if you like, a radical theory of the equality of all men, not in an active and political sense but as a direct devaluation of life which affects every man individually. Whatever he does and attempts is vain. Although his instincts oblige him to act and to cling to life on earth, that life has neither worth nor dignity. It is not in their relation to one another or even “before the law” that all men are equal; on the contrary: God has appointed that there be inequality between them in their lives on earth. But they are equal before death, before creatural decay, before God. True enough, even at this early period we find individual instances (in England especially of a very forceful kind) where politico-economic conclusions are drawn from this doctrine of equality. But by far the more prevailing attitude is that which, in the creatural character of man, reads only the fruitlessness and vanity of all earthly endeavor. For many in the countries north of the Alps, consciousness of their own predestined decay with that of all their works has a paralyzing effect upon intellectual endeavor insofar as its purpose is to make practical plans concerned with life on earth. All action aimed at the future of life in this world seems to them without value and without dignity, a mere play of instincts and passions. Their relation to earthly reality combines acceptance of its existing forms as an intensely expressive pageantry and radical unmasking of it as transitory and vain. The most extreme means are employed to elaborate this contrast between life and death, youth and age, health and sickness, idle and triumphant boastfulness in regard to one’s earthly role and miserable and plaintive rebellion against inexorable destruction. These simple themes are subjected to ever new variations—morose or passionately complaining, pious or cynical or again both at once—and often with gripping power. Average everyday life, with its sensual pleasures, its sorrows, its decline with age and illness, its end, has seldom been so impressively represented as during this epoch; and stylistically these representations are of a character which is clearly differentiated not only from the realistic art of the ancients—which goes without saying—but also from that of the earlier Middle Ages.