Light hath hunted out the night.”
How bold and coarse ye are! Was it this we asked of you, children rash and wayward, when we told you to be as children? We offered you milk; you are drinking wine. We led you softly, bridle in hand, along the narrow path. Mild and fearful, ye hesitated to go forward: and now, all at once, the bridle is broken; the course is cleared at a single bound. Ah! how foolish we were to let you make your own saints; to dress out the altar; to deck, to burden, to cover it up with flowers! Why, it is hardly distinguishable! And what we do see is the old heresy condemned of the Church, the innocence of nature: what am I saying?—a new heresy, not like to end to-morrow, the independence of man.
Listen and obey!—You are forbidden to invent, to create. No more legends, no more new saints: we have had enough of them. You are forbidden to introduce new chants in your worship: inspiration is not allowed. The martyrs you would bring to light should stay modestly within their tombs, waiting to be recognised by the Church. The clergy, the monks are forbidden to grant the tonsure of civil freedom to husbandmen and serfs. Such is the narrow fearful spirit that fills the Church of the Carlovingian days.[11] She unsays her words, she gives herself the lie, she says to the children, “Be old!”
A fall indeed! But is this earnest? They had bidden us all be young.—Ah! but priest and people are no longer one. A divorce without end begins, a gulf unpassable divides them for ever. The priest himself, a lord and prince, will come out in his golden cope, and chant in the royal speech of that great empire which is no more. For ourselves, a mournful company, bereft of human speech, of the only speech that God would care to hear, what else can we do but low and bleat with the guileless friends who never scorn us, who, in winter-time will keep us warm in their stable, or cover us with their fleeces? We will live with dumb beasts, and be dumb ourselves.
In sooth there is less need than before for our going to church. But the church will not hold us free: she insists on our returning to hear what we no longer understand. Thenceforth a mighty fog, a fog heavy and dun as lead, enwraps the world. For how long? For a whole millennium of horror. Throughout ten centuries, a languor unknown to all former times seizes upon the Middle Ages, even in part on those latter days that come midway betwixt sleep and waking, and holds them under the sway of a visitation most irksome, most unbearable; that convulsion, namely, of mental weariness, which men call a fit of yawning.
When the tireless bell rings at the wonted hours, they yawn; while the nasal chant is singing in the old Latin words, they yawn. It is all foreseen, there is nothing to hope for in the world, everything will come round just the same as before. The certainty of being bored to-morrow sets one yawning from to-day; and the long vista of wearisome days, of wearisome years to come, weighs men down, sickens them from the first with living. From brain to stomach, from stomach to mouth, the fatal fit spreads of its own accord, and keeps on distending the jaws without end or remedy. An actual disease the pious Bretons call it, ascribing it, however, to the malice of the Devil. He keeps crouching in the woods, the peasants say: if anyone passes by tending his cattle, he sings to him vespers and other rites, until he is dead with yawning.[12]
To be old is to be weak. When the Saracens, when the Norsemen threaten us, what will come to us if the people remain old? Charlemagne weeps, and the Church weeps too. She owns that her relics fail to guard her altars from these Barbarian devils.[13] Had she not better call upon the arm of that wayward child whom she was going to bind fast, the arm of that young giant whom she wanted to paralyse? This movement in two opposite ways fills the whole ninth century. The people are held back, anon they are hurled forward: we fear them and we call on them for aid. With them and by means of them we throw up hasty barriers, defences that may check the Barbarians, while sheltering the priests and their saints escaped thither from their churches.
In spite of the Bald Emperor’s[14] command not to build, there grows up a tower on the mountain. Thither comes the fugitive, crying, “In God’s name, take me in, at least my wife and children! Myself with my cattle will encamp in your outer enclosure.” The tower emboldens him and he feels himself a man. It gives him shade, and he in his turn defends, protects his protector.
Formerly in their hunger the small folk yielded themselves to the great as serfs; but here how great the difference! He offers himself as a vassal, one who would be called brave and valiant.[15] He gives himself up, and keeps himself, and reserves to himself the right of going elsewhere. “I will go further: the earth is large: I, too, like the rest, can rear my tower yonder. If I have defended the outworks, I can surely look after myself within.”
Thus nobly, thus grandly arose the feudal world. The master of the tower received his vassals with some such words as these: “Thou shalt go when thou willest, and if need be with my help; at least, if thou shouldst sink in the mire, I myself will dismount to succour thee.” These are the very words of the old formula.[16]
But, one day, what do I see? Can my sight be grown dim? The lord of the valley, as he rides about, sets up bounds that none may overleap; ay, and limits that you cannot see. “What is that? I don’t understand.” That means that the manor is shut in. “The lord keeps it all fast under gate and hinge, between heaven and earth.”
Most horrible! By virtue of what law is this vassus (or valiant one) held to his power? People will thereon have it, that vassus may also mean slave. In like manner the word servus, meaning a servant, often indeed a proud one, even a Count or Prince of the Empire, comes in the case of the weak to signify a serf, a wretch whose life is hardly worth a halfpenny.
In this damnable net are they caught. But down yonder, on his ground, is a man who avers that his land is free, a freehold, a fief of the sun. Seated on his boundary-stone, with hat pressed firmly down, he looks at Count or Emperor passing near. “Pass on, Emperor; go thy ways! If thou art firm on thy horse, yet more am I on my pillar. Thou mayest pass, but so will not I: for I am Freedom.”
But I lack courage to say what becomes of this man. The air grows thick around him: he breathes less and less freely. He seems to be under a spell: he cannot move: he is as one paralysed. His very beasts grow thin, as if a charm had been thrown over them. His servants die of hunger. His land bears nothing now; spirits sweep it clean by night.
Still he holds on: “The poor man is a king in his own house.” But he is not to be let alone. He gets summoned, must answer for himself in the Imperial Court. So he goes, like an old-world spectre, whom no one knows any more. “What is he?” ask the young. “Ah, he is neither a lord, nor a serf! Yet even then is he nothing?”
“Who am I? I am he who built the first tower, he who succoured you, he who, leaving the tower, went boldly forth to meet the Norse heathens at the bridge. Yet more, I dammed the river, I tilled the meadow, creating the land itself by drawing it God-like out of the waters. From this land who shall drive me?”
“No, my friend,” says a neighbour—“you shall not be driven away. You shall till this land, but in a way you little think for. Remember, my good fellow, how in your youth, some fifty years ago, you were rash enough to wed my father’s little serf, Jacqueline. Remember the proverb, ‘He who courts my hen is my cock.’ You belong to my fowl-yard. Ungird yourself; throw away your sword! From this day forth you are my serf.”
There is no invention here. The dreadful tale recurs incessantly during the Middle Ages. Ah, it was a sharp sword that stabbed him. I have abridged and suppressed much, for as often as one returns to these
