So the avaricious Fulbert took Abelard to dwell in his own house, and gave his niece’s education entirely into his care, and, as her teacher himself expresses it, delivered her “like a lamb to a hungry wolf.”
Heloise was probably the better educated of the two. She was the child of unknown parents. Bayle asserts that she was the daughter of a priest, and his facilities and laboriousness respecting such abstruse particulars no one will question. The authority from which he is possibly quoting, says that this priest was John “Somebody” (nescio cujus) and a canon of the same cathedral with Fulbert at Paris. Doubtless the trace of her ancestry is utterly lost to us beyond these meagre items. Even Fulbert’s alleged relationship has been questioned. But the scholarship of Heloise speaks for itself in a terse, sparkling Latin style, which is as pleasant beside Abelard’s lumbering sentences as a bright mountain brook beside a turbid and turbulent stream. Count de Bussy-Rabutin—no mean critic—has put on record that he never read more elegant Latin. She also understood Greek and Hebrew, with neither of which, strange to say, was Abelard acquainted. And at first blush it would seem that the teacher should have been the pupil.
Absolute justice requires that the ugly and disgraceful slurs in theHistoria Calamitatum, and even in the correspondence, should not be overlooked. Here is what will serve for a fair example. He says of her,Quae cum per faciem non esset infima, per abundantiam litterarum erat suprema—while she was not exactly the worst-looking of them, she was the best educated; and therefore he selected her! Thespretae injuria formaenever went further than this. But this is by no means the solitary instance of that low snarl in which the currish nature of the Breton rustic now and then indulged.
What, then, could have been the spell by which this charming woman drew Christendom after her? Popes and bishops called her “beloved daughter,” priests entitled her “sister,” and all laymen laid claim to her as “mother.” If she were not so beautiful as some authorities positively state, she must certainly have been marvellously captivating. But chiefest of her many graces was her crowning loyalty and love. It showed itself in perfect sympathy, in entire self-devotion. Michelet, indeed, has observedthat the legend of Abelard and Heloise is all that has survived in France out of the story of the Middle Ages.
Nor has the unanimity of literary judgment upon these lovers been less remarkable than the interest which they have inspired. With one voice Abelard is condemned and with one voice Heloise is extolled. “She was,” says a brilliant writer, “a great, heroic woman, one of those formed out of the finest clay of humanity.” “With the Grecian fire,” says another, “she had the Roman firmness.” And even the rude picture which the mechanical touch of Alexander Pope has painted, leaves to us in the “Epistle of Heloise” a trace of the same beauty, and affords one line—
“And graft my love immortal on thy fame”—
“And graft my love immortal on thy fame”—
which only needs to be reversed in order to be prophetic. Morison’s tribute is both nobler and more acute, for he testifies, “She walked through life with ever-reverted glances on the glory of her girlish love.” It was the same thought which Dante—after Boethius—puts into the lips of Francesca—
“There is no greater sorrowThan to be mindful of the happy timeIn misery, and that thy Teacher knows.”
“There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery, and that thy Teacher knows.”
Nay, it is even the very cameo out of Tennyson:
“As when a soul laments, which hath been blessed,Desiring what is mingled with past years,In yearnings that can never be expressedBy sighs, or groans, or tears.”
“As when a soul laments, which hath been blessed,
Desiring what is mingled with past years,
In yearnings that can never be expressed
By sighs, or groans, or tears.”
This is the heart which Abelard won. Winning it he won, and forever held, the woman whose it was. From that moment she merged her whole existence in his with a complete and utter abandonment of self, to the perfectness of which let her epistles from the Paraclete bear testimony. Across this story of undeviating devotion Abelard’s vanity, pride, and coarseness are written with smears and stains, like an illiterate monk who blots his comments upon a precious missal full of saints and angels. For, first of his offences, he revealed this love of his by really becoming a troubadour. He composed verses in the Romance tongue, recounting their loves, and set them to such stirring tunes that all the world was soon singing them. Hence grew the legend thatthe “Romance of the Rose” (Roman de la Rose) was his composition. It undoubtedly contains their story, but it was not his work; it belongs to William de Loris and Jean de Meung. But, as for Heloise, she was delighted. What would have been a crown of sorrow to other women was to her a crown of joy. She even announced to Abelard “with the utmost exultation” the advent of that unhappy being christened Astrolabe and destined to pass his forsaken and lonely existence shut up in a cloister. That people sang of this love; that it went to the ends of the earth; that nothing could prevent its being known—these were the happinesses of Heloise. Of the merit of the songs we cannot ourselves decide. They were originally anonymous, and only those familiar with the crabbed French of that period may hope to find them again.
Meanwhile, though the lectures suffered, and the students saw, and all Paris smiled, Fulbert was totally in the dark. This condition of affairs was predestined to come to an end, and it came in storm and anger. Abelard saw himself forced, against his will, to marry secretly. It was a sting to his egotism that ever rankled. It served, though, to pacify Fulbert and the rest of the relations; and being too glad and too loose-tongued to keep this handsome alliance from the public they presently told everybody. Heloise, thereupon, fearing for Abelard’s ambitious schemes, did not shrink from a point-blank falsehood. She denied the marriage. She had been in Brittany and was now at Argenteuil, of which she was by and by to become the abbess. And she added to her denial the self-abnegating sentiment that Abelard, who was created for all mankind, ought not to be sacrificed by “bondage to a woman.” It was worthy of her who so admired the “philosophic Aspasia,” and whose tutor and lover had done what he could to make her as “free from superstition” as himself. Her moral ideas were what he taught her, and he could not unteach them.
Among the complaisant and agreeable nuns of Argenteuil she now resided. It was but a few miles from Paris. Her husband frequently went thither, and in a short time thereafter she was enrolled as a novice. The fact aroused her relatives, and their mutterings became ominous; Fulbert, especially, taking this act in high dudgeon, as though it meant the premeditated repudiation of his niece. Their anger did not stop at words, but, knowingAbelard’s popularity, and fearing to attack him during the day, they bribed his valet and assaulted him by night in his own apartment.
It was this blow which flung Abelard from heaven to hell. His hitherto impregnable attitude; his fierce zeal for his opinions; his hopes of a new philosophy which should make his name immortal, all vanished before it as spider-webs break before a sword. And when, conscious that he was no more a god and a hero, but an insulted and defeated man, he rose from his bed of pain, the prospect was not improved. The outpoured indignation of bishops and canons and clergy—the lamentations of the women and the students—did not appease him. A whisper was in his soul like that of Haman’s wife. Mordecai, the despised, was coming to the kingdom and the Agagite was doomed.
There were reasons which led him to think of seeking aid from the Pope against his enemies. But Fulk of Deuil, his good friend, advised him not to try it. “You have no money,” said honest, plain spoken Fulk, “and what can you do at Rome without money?” It was bitter truth. Yet the Abbé Migne, forgetting the much worse things Bernard had said of the Roman Curia in the treatiseDe Consideratione, exscinds the passage from Fulk’s letter on the ground that it would cause “scandal to Catholic ears.” Edification first, truth afterward, if at all!
Therefore, with a poisoned soul, he sought the Abbey of St. Denis to hide himself from the gaze of the world. To a man so proud a life without imperial power was a living death. Yet from those walls he issues his edict that Heloise shall take the veil. His vanity led him to carry out the original cause of hostility even to its unalterable result. But Heloise, whatever she might have thought or felt, marched with lofty resignation to her fate. Quoting aloud—as his confession pitifully recalls—the words of Cornelia to Pompey from the “Pharsalia” of Lucan, she takes the vows. Never was there less of religion in such a ceremony! Henceforth she walks like the moon in distant brightness, coming to meet us down the ages as comes the Queen Louise of Gustav Richter’s superb picture. She is transfigured by her self-forgetting love, and “all that is left of her,” in the best and truest sense, is now “pure womanly.”
For Abelard at St. Denis the case was different. He foundthe monks worldly and dissolute and he reproved them. The effect was similar to the case of Lot—the reformer departed with all his belongings. He then renewed his old lectures. His scholars followed him to Maisoncelle, where, in their avidity of knowledge, they overcrowded every resource of shelter and food. He offered them that fascinating combination, dialectics and divinity. Like the saltpetre and the charcoal these were harmless when apart and explosive when together, particularly if you add the sulphurous heart which now smoked in his bosom. A harsh and vindictive tone was given to his disposition, and it was natural that he should be, at least tentatively, a heretic. These moral bruises are worse than any or all physical injuries; the man who has felt them can never be again what he was before. And now Anselm and William and Fulbert and everybody that he had bullied or taunted or threatened turned upon him. The gates to the black cavern of the winds were open and the blasts of fate were icy cold.
The papal legate Conan held a council at Soissons in 1121. The opinions of Abelard were received with disfavor. They humiliated the poor wretch among them and made him burn his own book, and then mumble through acredoamid his “sobs and sighs and tears.” These words are his own, and his is also the statement that he was put into the custody of the Abbot of St. Medard and there he was lectured, and even lashed by the convent whip, until he exhibited proper submission. Poetical justice had befallen him. For he confesses, to his shame, that he had coerced and even struck Heloise. Now he, too, was coerced, and he, too, was struck.
Then back again to St. Denis, with more hatred and hard speeches than ever. But Suger, the new abbot, an easy-going lover of bric-à-brac and good living, set him free, a “masterless man” past forty years of age, with Heloise out of reach and the spears of exultant enemies bristling in every hedge. Is it a wonder that he took to the banks of the Ardusson near Troyes, wattled himself a rude hut and resolved to be a hermit? But even there in the desert the people thronged him and built a village of huts about his own. His misfortunes became a portion of his strength. And there they erected for him a church and a cloister which he dedicated to the Paraclete, a daring innovation, since it was thenconsidered highly heterodox thus to distinguish one person of the Trinity from the other two.
Under such storms and heat the nature of the man had been seriously warped. He became suspicious, gloomy, and weakly unstable. His correspondence with Heloise had been completely broken off. He went into the monotonous Champagne, then out into the bleak Brittany, and finally (1125) he received the abbacy of St. Gildas. His friends, perhaps, desired to save him from homelessness and so from the dangers which the relentless malice of his old enemies was constantly piling up. But their choice of a refuge reveals how little their ecclesiastical influence was worth. The monks of St. Gildas lived in open sin, and the people around the cloister were semi-barbarians. It may be that they were ready to welcome Abelard because they supposed he would be charitable to their peccadilloes, but if they fancied this, their mistake was great. He really measured himself against their vices and suffered a predestined defeat. At St. Gildas he touched the nadir of his fate as at Paris he had reached its zenith. The monks conspired against him. They sought to poison him, contaminating with their drugs even the cup of the Eucharist. When his life was not fear it was horror, and when it was not horror it was despair.
At this time, too, for calamity never comes singly, Suger had succeeded in routing from Argenteuil the Abbess Heloise with all her nuns. He had complained to Rome that the lands of Argenteuil were the chartered right of St. Denis and that the nuns were very scandalous. So Abelard roused himself sufficiently to hand the deserted abbey of the Paraclete over to his wife; to confirm it by every possible act and deed against invasion; and to secure, in the despite of Bernard of Clairvaux, who was his presumptive enemy, a special bull of Innocent II. to make all this permanent. To these walls Heloise therefore removed. They were doubly dear to her for Abelard’s sake. She had no true “vocation” for her office, but the Pope called her and her sisterhood his “dear daughters,” and it was the best that they could do. Abelard prepared their forms of service for them, and thus again, after all these years, communication existed and letters passed between them.
These forms brought on a controversy with Bernard, who didnot like them. The letters also are still extant, often translated, but never in anything except the original Latin, speaking out the real nature of the writers. On the part of Heloise they reveal the depth of an unending love. On the part of Abelard they are as cold and occasionally as cruel as anything to which a translator can turn his pen. After a careful survey of their contents the conclusion is irresistible that Heloise is a woman whose lofty love carries with it unhesitatingly the mind, the will, the senses—everything. Her faults are the faults of her time and of her teaching, not of her soul. But, by the survival of its most forcible elements, Abelard’s character has been developed into a selfish coldness both unnatural and ungrateful. As a man, at this stage of his career, one abhors and pities him.
Presently upon the dead colorlessness of this “burned-out crater healed with snow,” the red light of a new controversy is cast. In this final struggle the redoubtable force of the splendid debater flashed up once more. But he was defeated by Bernard at Sens (1140), and whether this defeat was by fair logic or by the hostile spirit of the age it does not matter. Defeated he was, and he rushed out declaring that he would appeal to Rome. Happily his way led him through Cluny, and there good, large-hearted, and large-bodied Peter the Venerable took him in. For the first time, perhaps, in all his life he came into close relations with a man genuinely great. And Peter of Cluny himself wrote to the Pope; detaining Abelard meanwhile by kind assiduities, in that genial cloister whose humanity cherished neither bigotry nor license. Later he even reconciled the two disputants, and the broken and weary debater died at last (April 21st, 1142) at St. Marcel, whither he had been sent for change of climate by the care of his hospitable friend.
There is a painting—a true artist’s conception, but a mere daub in fact—which hangs in a New York village and which represents a dead knight stretched upon the ground. He lies upon his back on the sodden earth in the melting snow. The sky above him is of a dull and awful gray, and the carrion birds are flying in a long, hurrying line to join those already at the feast. A broken sword is strained in his right hand, his armor is hacked and darkly spotted with mire and blood, and his feet have fallen into a little stream. So would have fallen Abelard but for the charity andmercy of Peter the Venerable. Remembering all that he had been it is somewhat comforting to read of his last days. For certain letters passed between Peter of Cluny and Heloise, and these, too, are extant and accessible.
The abbot says to her, after describing the daily life of Abelard, “How holily, how devoutly, in what a catholic spirit he made confession, first of his faith and then of his sins! ... Thus Master Peter finished his days, and he who for his knowledge was famed throughout the world, in the discipleship of Him who said, ‘Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart,’ persevered, in meekness and humility, and, as we may believe, passed to the Lord.” It is in such language that this benevolent man addresses his “venerable and very dear sister,” concerning, as he tenderly puts it, her “first husband in the Lord.” And doubtless this same Abelard became, at the last, a little child, who through much tribulation had unlearned his haughty and selfish temper, and had gone back from subtleties and logic to say in all simplicity, Abba, Father! And it is not less interesting for us to discover in the second epistle of Heloise to Peter of Cluny, that the mother’s heart yearns over her boy, and that she commends Astrolabe to the care and protection of his father’s benefactor, a trust which, in his next letter, Peter accepts and promises to discharge.
Of the poetry of Abelard much has unquestionably been lost. His troubadour ballads may have been conveniently suppressed; it is often the fate of wise men’s lighter productions. And his hymns were for long years untraced, except in the instance of theMittit ad virginemand of another upon the Trinity, which was ascribed to him, but is now accredited to Hildebert. A very pretty poem,Ornarunt terram germina, preserved by Du Meril (Poesies Populaires Lat., p. 444) is given in the collection of Archbishop Trench and again in that of Professor March. Even in English its grace and daintiness do not entirely escape us, and they show how possible it was for him to have written the love-songs which celebrated Heloise.
The earth is green with grasses;The sky is filled with lights—Sun, moon, and stars. There passesVast use through days and nights.
The earth is green with grasses;
The sky is filled with lights—
Sun, moon, and stars. There passes
Vast use through days and nights.
On either hand upbuilded,Arouse, O man, and see!Those heavenly realms are gildedBy help which shines for thee.
On either hand upbuilded,
Arouse, O man, and see!
Those heavenly realms are gilded
By help which shines for thee.
The suns of winter cheer theeFor lack of fire below;While the bright moon draws near thee,With stars, thy path to show!
The suns of winter cheer thee
For lack of fire below;
While the bright moon draws near thee,
With stars, thy path to show!
Leave pride her ivory spaces;The poor man on the grassLooks up, from fragrant placesBy which the song-birds pass.
Leave pride her ivory spaces;
The poor man on the grass
Looks up, from fragrant places
By which the song-birds pass.
The rich, with wasteful labor,(For vaulted domes shall fall,)Mocking his poorer neighbor,Paints heaven within his hall.
The rich, with wasteful labor,
(For vaulted domes shall fall,)
Mocking his poorer neighbor,
Paints heaven within his hall.
But in that open chamberWhere all things fairest are,Let the poor man rememberHow God paints sun and star.
But in that open chamber
Where all things fairest are,
Let the poor man remember
How God paints sun and star.
So vast a work and splendidIs nature’s more than man’s!No pains nor cost attendedThose age-enduring plans!
So vast a work and splendid
Is nature’s more than man’s!
No pains nor cost attended
Those age-enduring plans!
The rich man keeps his servant,An angel guards the poor,And God sends stars observantTo watch above his door!
The rich man keeps his servant,
An angel guards the poor,
And God sends stars observant
To watch above his door!
At length the adage of Buddha was fulfilled that “Hatred does not cease by hatred; hatred ceaseth by love.” This is an old rule. For in 1836 his romantic story secured an editor for the scholar’s works in the person of Monsieur Victor Cousin, who at that date, and again in 1849, republished them. They had been issued in 1616 by Francis d’Amboise at Paris, and the city of his fame and sorrow appropriately witnessed their reappearance. But even then there were no more verses, and the editors of the twelfth volume of theHistoire Litteraire de la Francealso regarded those productions as hopelessly lost. Yet they had been in Paris, andwhen thePatrologiaof Migne reached “Tom. 178” they had been actually recovered. The story is of the same pattern as the author’s life—the man and his works had infinite vicissitudes.
When Belgium was occupied by the French, these ninety-three hymns, written for the abbey of the Paraclete between 1125 and 1134, were lying hid incodice quincunciali, whatever this may mean. The account seems to require aboxof about five inches in height, rather than an ordinarycodexor bound volume. Thiscodexwas brought to Paris and there remained during the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. When his Empire fell, the box and its contents returned to Belgium. They bore the seals of the Republic and of the Empire and they also had the stamp of the Royal Library of Brussels. They were indeed a catalogued part of that library’s treasures, but their value was unguessed. One day, after their return, a German student named Oehler, while rummaging through thecodexfound in it thelibellus, or little book, which contained these three series of hymns. Like the “hymnarium” of Hilary they were known to have been in existence, and hence he immediately inferred their authorship. They embraced, to his delight, a complete collection for all the religious hours and for the principal festivals of the Church.
It is strikingly characteristic of the superficial nature of many studies in Latin hymnology, that Oehler apparently thought of nothing else that might be in thecodex, but proceeded at once to publish eight of the recovered hymns. These, attracting the notice of Monsieur Cousin, he purchased a full transcript of thelibellusat a “fair price” from the discoverer. It was, however, reserved for Émile Gachet, a Belgian, to “give a not unlucky day to paleography” in the course of which he lighted upon this samecodexand found it still to contain the larger part of an epistle treating of Latin hymnology, addressed to Heloise, and announcing the hymns of which it was the preface. Thus the identification was perfect, and the introductions and the hymns are again joined with the other works of their authors. In 1838 a set ofPlanctus—“Lamentations”—had been found in the Vatican Library. They are moderate in merit, and these new pieces were therefore invaluable in determining Abelard’s rank as a poet. In the main, his hymns are didactic and cold. But there is at least one which has held its place anonymously in the service of the Church andupon this his reputation may safely rest. It was translated by Dr. Neale from the imperfect text of a Toledo breviary, and it can be found inHymns, Ancient and Modern(No. 343), and in Mone (Lat. Hym. des Mittelalters, I., 382). In the Paraclete Breviary it is “xxviii.,Ad Vesperas.”
O quanta, qualia sunt illa sabbata,Quae semper celebrat superna curia!Quae fessis requies, quae merces fortibus,Cum erit omnia Deus in omnibus.
O quanta, qualia sunt illa sabbata,
Quae semper celebrat superna curia!
Quae fessis requies, quae merces fortibus,
Cum erit omnia Deus in omnibus.
Vere Jherusalem illic est civitasCujus pax jugis est summa jucunditas,Ubi non praevenit rem desiderium,Nec desiderio nimis est praemium.
Vere Jherusalem illic est civitas
Cujus pax jugis est summa jucunditas,
Ubi non praevenit rem desiderium,
Nec desiderio nimis est praemium.
Quis rex! quae curia! quale palatium!Quae pax! quae requies! quod illud gaudium!Hujus participes exponant gloriaeSi, quantum sentiunt, possint exprimere.
Quis rex! quae curia! quale palatium!
Quae pax! quae requies! quod illud gaudium!
Hujus participes exponant gloriae
Si, quantum sentiunt, possint exprimere.
Nostrum est interim mentem erigere,Et totis patriam votis appetere,Et ad Jherusalem a Babilonia,Post longa regredi tandem exilia.
Nostrum est interim mentem erigere,
Et totis patriam votis appetere,
Et ad Jherusalem a Babilonia,
Post longa regredi tandem exilia.
Illic, molestiis finitis omnibus,Securi cantica Syon cantabimus,Et juges gratias de donis gratiaeBeata referet plebs tibi, Domine.
Illic, molestiis finitis omnibus,
Securi cantica Syon cantabimus,
Et juges gratias de donis gratiae
Beata referet plebs tibi, Domine.
Illic ex sabbato succedet sabbatum,Perpes laetitia sabbatizantium,Nec ineffabiles cessabunt jubili,Quos decantabimus et nos et angeli.
Illic ex sabbato succedet sabbatum,
Perpes laetitia sabbatizantium,
Nec ineffabiles cessabunt jubili,
Quos decantabimus et nos et angeli.
Oh what shall be, oh when shall be, that holy Sabbath day,Which heavenly care shall ever keep and celebrate alway;When rest is found for weary limbs, when labor hath reward,When everything, forevermore, is joyful in the Lord?
Oh what shall be, oh when shall be, that holy Sabbath day,
Which heavenly care shall ever keep and celebrate alway;
When rest is found for weary limbs, when labor hath reward,
When everything, forevermore, is joyful in the Lord?
The true Jerusalem above, the holy town, is there,Whose duties are so full of joy, whose joy so free from care;Where disappointment cometh not to check the longing heart,And where the soul in ecstasy hath gained her better part.
The true Jerusalem above, the holy town, is there,
Whose duties are so full of joy, whose joy so free from care;
Where disappointment cometh not to check the longing heart,
And where the soul in ecstasy hath gained her better part.
O glorious King, O happy state, O palace of the blest!O sacred peace and holy joy and perfect heavenly rest.To thee aspire thy citizens in glory’s bright array,And what they feel and what they know they strive in vain to say.
O glorious King, O happy state, O palace of the blest!
O sacred peace and holy joy and perfect heavenly rest.
To thee aspire thy citizens in glory’s bright array,
And what they feel and what they know they strive in vain to say.
For while we wait and long for home, it shall be ours to raiseOur songs and chants, and vows and prayers, in that dear country’s praise;And from these Babylonian streams to lift our weary eyes,And view the city that we love descending from the skies.
For while we wait and long for home, it shall be ours to raise
Our songs and chants, and vows and prayers, in that dear country’s praise;
And from these Babylonian streams to lift our weary eyes,
And view the city that we love descending from the skies.
There, there, secure from every ill, in freedom we shall singThe songs of Zion, hindered here by days of suffering,And unto thee, our gracious Lord, our praises shall confessThat all our sorrow hath been good, and thou by pain canst bless.
There, there, secure from every ill, in freedom we shall sing
The songs of Zion, hindered here by days of suffering,
And unto thee, our gracious Lord, our praises shall confess
That all our sorrow hath been good, and thou by pain canst bless.
There Sabbath day to Sabbath day sheds on a ceaseless light,Eternal pleasure of the saints who keep that Sabbath bright;Nor shall the chant ineffable decline, nor ever cease,Which we with all the angels sing in that sweet realm of peace.
There Sabbath day to Sabbath day sheds on a ceaseless light,
Eternal pleasure of the saints who keep that Sabbath bright;
Nor shall the chant ineffable decline, nor ever cease,
Which we with all the angels sing in that sweet realm of peace.
The rhythm of the Trinity, previously mentioned, is so good that it is usually, and, it may be, correctly, ascribed to Hildebert of Lavardin; and thePlanctus Variihave really something more than that “inconsiderable merit” which Archbishop Trench allows to them. They are irregular in form and metre, and their subjects (which evidently reflect their author’s feelings) are: The Wail of Dinah; Jacob’s Lament over Joseph and Benjamin; The Sorrow of the Virgins over Jephthah’s Daughter; The Israelites’ Dirge over Samson; The Grief of David over Abner and his Elegy upon Saul and Jonathan. Abelard also composed a long poem to Astrolabe, giving him plenty of good counsel in fair pentameter, but in rather prosaic phrases. Some of it sounds like Lord Chesterfield’s worldly wisdom, and there are portions of the production which are plainly affected by the soured and saddened spirit of the author. “There is nothing,” he tells the poor, forsaken lad, “better than a good woman, and nothing worse than a bad one,” and, “as in all species of rapacious birds,” the female is the most to be dreaded!
Thus the poems which we possess number one hundred and two all told. But for ordinary readers not more than five—if we exclude the present correct Latin form of theO quanta qualia—areavailable in the original, and these are scattered through three or four collections. An unkind fate has still pursued these poor relics of the man who took shelter under the broad wing of Peter the Venerable, and who, by having escaped into such sanctuary, has barred out from thenceforth all uncharitable thoughts. It may be added that of Heloise also we have a reputed hymn,Requiescat a labore, but Königsfeld and Daniel both deny the authorship. In this they are doubtless correct.
We may best remember the great controversialist when he is lying dead in his new-found peace and childlikeness. At the request of Heloise, Peter of Cluny delivered up his body to be buried within the walls of the Paraclete, in defiance of any misconstruction or of any sneer. He accompanied the act with the absolution which she asked. It reads thus:
“I, Peter, Abbot of Cluny, who received Peter Abelard as a Cluniac monk, and who have granted his body to be delivered secretly [furtim delatum, wrote the big-hearted bishop] to Heloise, the abbess, and to the nuns of the Paraclete, by the authority of the Omnipotent God and of all saints, do absolve him in virtue of my office from all his sins.” This was to have been engraved upon a metal plate and fastened above the tomb of the dead rhetorician, but for some reason—perhaps connected with thefurtim delatum—the plan was never carried out. But the absolution was probably attached to the tomb for a short time in order to make it effective.
“Women,” says Mrs. Browning, “are knights-errant to the last.” For a score of years, Heloise went each evening to that tomb to weep and pray. She remembered and observed nothing of those unpleasant traits which later times have noticed. If she ever cursed any one it must have been Fulbert, or others of the dead man’s enemies, and
“A curse from the depths of womanhoodIs very salt and bitter and good.”
“A curse from the depths of womanhood
Is very salt and bitter and good.”
At length, like every watching and every waiting, this, too, came to an end, and she died on May 17th, 1164, precisely at his age of sixty-three years. And they laid her beside him in the same grave, as was meet and right.
But evil fate still flapped a raven wing above the pair. Even indeath they have scarcely rested in peace. In 1497 the tomb was opened from religious motives and the bodies were removed and placed in separate vaults. In 1630 the Abbess Marie de Rochefoucauld placed them in the chapel of the Trinity. In 1792 they were again removed to Nogent, near Paris. In 1800, by order of Lucien Bonaparte, they were transferred to the garden of the “Musée des Monumens Français.” This being destroyed in 1815, they were again entombed in Père-la-Chaise. M. Lenoir, keeper of the Museum, had constructed the present Gothic sepulchre out of the ruins of the abbey of the Paraclete, uniting with these an ancient tomb from St. Marcel in which Abelard had at first been laid. Pugin says that this was transferred from the Musée grounds. The monument reared at the Paraclete and ornamented with a figure of the Trinity, perished in 1794 during the confusion of the Revolution. General Pajol, the subsequent owner of the grounds, placed a marble pillar above the stone sarcophagus which yet existed, but the lead coffin had already been taken to Paris. The tomb in Père-la-Chaise has been recently repaired, and there the sentimental of all nations have brought flowers and scrawled names and scribbled verses. Even at the present day a curious collection of wire crosses, immortelles, and visiting-cards can be seen constantly upon it.
The principal inscription was composed by the Academie des Inscriptions in 1766, at the instance of Marie de Roucy de Rochefoucauld, Abbess of the Paraclete, like her namesake of 1497; and it was carved at her cost upon the stone.
Nor is this all. The story of Abelard and Heloise has a literature of its own. We have no authentic portraits, if we except the fine pictures of Robert Léfèbvre engraved by Desnoyers, which rest upon I know not what of possible likeness. But the Englishman, Berington; the Germans, Brucker and Carriere and Fessler and Schlosser and Feuerbach; the Frenchmen, De Rémusat and Cousin and Guizot and Delepierre and Lamartine and Dom Gervaise; the Italian, Tòsti; the Americans, W. W. Newton, Wight, and Abby Sage Richardson, and a host of other authors and essayists and reviewers, have in one form or another told the sad, sweet legend of this love. It has never lacked its audience, and its perpetual charm has been the character of Heloise. Like the fair and unfortunate maid of Astolat, who so patheticallyloved Launcelot, it may be said of her devotion that she “gave such attendance upon him, there was never a woman did more kindlyer for man than shee did.” It was a rare exhibition of that precious jewel, an unselfish, loyal, and flawless heart!
It serves to illustrate the meshes which held the highest men of the twelfth century together, when we encounter Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny. His true name was Pierre Maurice de Montboisier and he was from Auvergne—“one of the noblest and most genial natures,” says Morison, “to be met with in this or in any time.” What a fine old man he was! Under him as abbot, Bernard of Cluny was prior, and the loving care of Peter prepared an epitaph for that bravest and sweetest of singers. It was he who bearded the other Bernard in his very den, and who came out of many contests against that almost invincible ecclesiast with more honor than before. Few could say this of a battle with the Abbot of Clairvaux; and to no one but Peter does Morison, the biographer of Bernard, concede any such victory.
It was also this admirable Peter who took Peter Abelard under his protection. With a large and patient generosity he developed the better nature of that headstrong, conceited, unhappy man; and when Abelard died he wrote to Heloise the really warmhearted and tender letter, with a great deal of humanity about it, which I have quoted already. And thus, to whomsoever it may fall to consider the history of France in the twelfth century; or of Abelard and the new philosophy; or of Bernard and ecclesiastical polity; or of the other Bernard and the Latin hymns, it is inevitable that the name of Peter the Venerable shall arise and stand high above the throng of those by which he is surrounded.
His mother’s name was Raingarde, and her death, long after he had attained his wide reputation, was deeply felt by him as that of one of the best of women and dearest of mothers. For Pierre de Montboisier, in those days when the stagnation and corruption of thought and morals were not felt as they were felt later on, was a man as well as a monk. But when, at last, the religious people became monks and not men; when they were stupid, uninteresting,fat-fleshed and gross in life; when they had no courage or piety; then they neither did the world any good nor made their own souls ripe for heaven. And as sportsmen tell us that the mellow “bob-o-link” ceases to sing and is only fit for slaughter when he becomes the “rice bird” of the South, so it was with them. Latin hymnology almost ceases to be interesting after this century. And Peter the Venerable, while he wrote but little himself, is too fine a factor in the arousing of others for us to forget him and his work.
He must have been born in 1092 or 1094—the earlier date being more probable; and when he was sixteen or seventeen (1109) he became a monk of Cluny. These were the “black” monks;—as the Cistercians of Citeaux and Clairvaux were the “white.” He had six brothers, most of whom took similar vows. What else indeed was there to do? You must either hack and hew your way with a battle-axe, and risk your neck and your castle, or you must become a monk. There was no middle course. Peace-loving, studious people—those who aimed to help the world up toward God—had no other choice. Nowadays we should find plenty of room for Peter; but he did what was then best, and entered Cluny.
At thirty years of age he was its abbot. This was in 1122. It happened by reason of Pontius, the former abbot, a self-sufficient and imperious man, being forced to resign his office and go on pilgrimage to Palestine; he even promised not to come back at all. Then the monks of Cluny elected another abbot; and as he died almost immediately, they were compelled to choose a third, namely Peter. But it was in a hard seat that they placed him; he had a mismanaged property, and a body of men who needed a good deal of attention.
Let us picture him to us in the fashion and habit of his appearance. He had a “happy face,” a “majestic figure,” and “plenty of those other unfailing signs of virtues” which justified his name “The Venerable.” It was such a big-hearted, big-bodied style of man who now undertook this reformation. By the help of Matthew, Prior of St. Martin in the Fields, near Paris, he effected it in about three months. Then there was a period of peace. But, all of a sudden, here comes Pontius, with soldiers at his heels, when Peter is absent, wanting his old placeagain. He bursts in the gates, forces the monks who remain to swear allegiance, carries off crosses and candlesticks and whatever was worth anything for melting down into money, and plays robber-baron over all the neighborhood. Peter himself tells the story: “He came in my absence.... With a motley crowd of soldiers and women rushing in together, he marched into the cloisters. He turned his hand to the sacred things.... He raided the villages and castles around the abbey, and, trying to subdue the religious places in a barbaric way, he wasted with fire and sword all that he could.” It was certainly a very serious matter.
Peter did the best he could with it—this resulting in Honorius II. despatching a legate from Rome with a great curse, ready-baked and smoking-hot, for the soul’s benefit of that “sacrilegious, schismatic, and excommunicate usurper,” Pontius. I have not read the curse; but I am positively certain that Pontius and Pontius Pilate must have been elaborately compared in its sentences. Such anathemas were supposed to dry the blood and wither the brain. Pontius trembled and restored his ill gotten gains and vanished to his own place. And Peter had peace at last.
There had already been a controversy with St. Bernard about Robert, Bernard’s cousin, who liked the cordiality of Cluny a good deal better than the thin-visaged and almost fierce zeal of Clairvaux. For this reason he changed his allegiance. Consequently Bernard wanted him sent home. And by this time he was, according to strict rule, actually restored. However, Clairvaux chuckled very much at the confusion in Cluny; and Bernard was ungenerous enough to take this time, of all others, to publish quite an elaborate and even brilliant disparagement of the Cluniac rule. I shall let this also pass for the present, for it will meet us again, only saying that Peter seems to have gone on wisely about his own business and avoided any reply—a quite unusual proceeding in a controversial age. In 1126 he had taken up again his previous line of administration; and when this “apology” came out in 1127 he was practically meeting its objections in the best manner. As Frederick Maurice says of him, “The Abbot of Cluny would have wished the monk to be rather an example to men of the world of what they might become, than the type of a kind of life which was in opposition to theirs. He feared that agrievously stringent rule would lead ultimately to a terrible laxity.”
In 1130 Pope Honorius died. Pierre de Leon (Peter Leonis), calling himself Anacletus, got himself illegally elected, and seized the control at Rome. Cardinal Gregory of San Angelo, who was the rightful but weaker claimant, assumed the title of Innocent II., and forthwith set out to secure the help of the great abbeys of France. Now Anacletus had been a Cluniac; and Bernard, Peter’s and Cluny’s opponent, favored Innocent. But when Innocent, in 1132, appeared at Cluny, he was hailed as the true and genuine Pope—a piece of magnanimity which he had no right to expect.
And from this time Peter’s allegiance was undoubted; although, like a great many persons in the world, Innocent II. conceded more to the stern will of Bernard than to the generous conduct of the Abbot of Cluny. Indeed, he did but very little in the way of privilege for Peter’s abbey; and he turned nearly all his gifts and favors toward Bernard. This so exalted the Cistercians that Peter protested. It is a blot upon Innocent that such a protest was needed. For Peter had been the first to welcome him, sending him “sixty horses and mules, with everything which could be wanted by a pope in distress.”
Many a man would have wheeled around and left the ingrate. But Peter’s revenge was handsome and characteristic. He summoned a general chapter of his order; and it was held at the time that Innocent, recognized at length, was going away to Rome. There were “two hundred priors and a thousand ecclesiasts,” delegates from France, England, Spain, Germany, and Italy. These cheerfully and promptly agreed to accept a more stringent rule in all their religious houses. And thus Innocent, and his Warwick of a Bernard, could see for themselves the strength and the charity, and the sincere purpose of the man whom they were setting aside. I feel that I must here add the exact words in which Morison, St. Bernard’s best biographer, justifies this estimate of the character of Peter the Venerable. “The relations between Peter and Bernard throughout their lives,” he says (p. 222,note), “give rise to contrasts little favorable to the latter. Peter nearly always is gentle, conciliating, and careful not to give offence, even when as here (in the case of the Bishop of Langres)sorely provoked. Bernard too often made return by hard and even violent language and conduct.”
With such a stately and well-balanced person in our mind’s eye, we cannot be surprised to find that he had plenty of solid pluck, that he was “mild as he was game, and game as he was mild.” In 1134, returning from the Council of Pisa against Anacletus, he and his followers were attacked by robbers. The abbot tucked up his sleeves, and took the sword of the Church militant on the spot. Perhaps he was glad to let his big thews and sinews have full play. At all events he so dashed and smote these ungodly men, that he beat them actually back, and had therefrom considerable glory. I never read that he or his abbey was much meddled with afterward.
About this date his visits to Spain drew his attention to the Koran. He was struck by the religious efficiency of it, and in order to meet it better he prepared for a full translation of it. Peter of Toledo, Hermann of Dalmatia, and an Englishman named Robert Kennet, or perhaps (says theHistoire Litteraire) de Retines, were selected for this duty. To them were added an Arab scholar and Peter of Poitiers, the abbot’s favorite private secretary. They were to render the Koran into Latin directly; and at it they went, accomplishing their task between 1141 and 1144, at the time of an epidemic in the monastery. Then Peter himself joined with them in a refutation of its errors—albeit his Latinity was not first-rate, being rather that of a man of affairs than of a student. There was another Latin refutation of the Koran by Brother Richard, a Dominican who lived in the thirteenth and into the fourteenth century. Luther translated that into German in 1542.
What a warm-blooded, good, hearty fellow Peter must have been! He had only found three hundred monks at Cluny in 1122; but Hugo of Cluny, his successor, was entitled to take rule, there and elsewhere, over ten thousand. Mount Tabor, the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and Constantinople were among the places where the “black” monks were well established. And a large share of this was due to the sagacity and statesmanship of Peter. In proof of this fine humanity, take his behavior to Abelard. The full story comes properly in another place; for Abelard himself was a writer of hymns, and worthy of more than transient reference. But when poor Abelard was repudiated, disgraced, shamefullymutilated, and nearly at despair’s edge, wearied out with St. Gildas and his refractory monks, and finally defeated by the purer and higher logic of Bernard, then, indeed, do we see Peter of Cluny at his best. He received the disappointed and broken man with “the welcome of an unutterably guileless and sympathetic heart.” Cluny’s gates opened wide to take him in. Cluny’s genial, restful spirit closed in about his own like the feathers of the mother bird around her callow, shivering brood.
And when he dies, it is Cluny’s abbot who details with the loving particularity, which would most help the sore heart of Heloise, all his last doings. He speaks even to the kinship of every age when, after this long and tender letter, whose Latin glows with a deep fervency, he closes in this wise: “May God, in your stead, comfort him in his bosom; comfort him as another you; and guard him till through grace he is restored to you at the coming of the Lord, with the shout of the archangel and the trump of God descending from the heavens.”
It is time that we speak of his writings, of which a full edition was published at Paris in 1522, one of the Cluniac monks being its compiler. Frequently, during the next two hundred years, they are republished in whole or in part. They are thus by no means inaccessible, though their merit is not so great. One of the important works is directed against the Jews, for whom he had a most pious dislike. Others are in the nature of epistles or of controversial replies, valuable only for their time and their spirit.
Of his verse, however, we have left us but about fourteen specimens. One of these is against the detractors of the poetry of Peter of Poitiers, who were nearer right than he supposed them to be. Another is a rhymed epistle to a certain Raimond, of some sixty-four lines. Then we have a “prose,” the word being cognate toprosody, in honor of Jesus Christ. Its structure, except for the additional short syllable, is identical with the “leonine and tailed rhyme” of Bernard of Morlaix, his prior: