MORNING PRAYER

Grant me with joy to rise to-day,

Lord God, and go upon my way

Beneath Thy care, what path soe'er I take.
Lord Christ, vouchsafe in me to prove

The mighty power of Thy love,

And guard me well, for Thy sweet Mother's sake.

As angels watched the Mother Maid

And Thee within the manger laid,

Young Child and ancient Deity,

Humble, with ox and ass on either hand,

Though holy Joseph also kept

His happy watch the while ye slept,

And guarded you right faithfully,

So guard Thou me, that Thy divine command
May not be unfulfilled in me.

It was in the Crusades, however, that medieval piety found its most natural outlet; and though at the end of the twelfth century the crusading spirit was already on the wane, Walter von der Vogelweide's thoughts turned often in the direction of the Holy Land; and in his later poems he laments the infirmity which prevented him from crossing the sea and earning for himself

That eternal crown

Which any churl may gain with sword, and shield, and spear.

Moreover, one of the charges which he frequently reiterates against the Pope is that of diverting the funds, which were ostensibly collected for the defence of the Holy Land, to the prosecution of his own schemes of ambition nearer home:

Little, methinks, of all this wealth will go to aid God's land:
Priests seldom let the money slip that once they have in hand.

Sometimes, even, in his enthusiasm for the cause of the Holy Sepulchre, Walter does not hesitate to criticise even more exalted powers than Pope and clergy, as the following poem will show :

He who ne'er Himself began,

Yet make begin both will and can,

Can make an end, and one without an end.
Since all creation to His will must bend,
Can there be praise more high than He inspires?

First, then, to Him my song I raise,

Whose praise is higher than all praise;
And holy is the praise that He requires.

Now laud we too the sweetest Maid,
Who to her Son ne'er vainly prayed-
Mother of Him she is who saved us all.

What fairer comfort on our souls could fall

Than that all Heaven her will obeys?
Come, then, the old, and eke the young,
That her high glory may be sung;
Since she is good, she's good to praise.

I ought to praise you angels, too,

But that I'm far too wise to do.

What to the heathen have ye wrought of ill?
Since all unseen ye are and voiceless still,

Tell us, to help the cause, what have ye done?
If God's revenge I too could wreak,

Silent as you, what need to speak?

I'd leave you gentlemen alone.

Sir Michaël, Sir Gabriel,

Sir Foe of Devils, Raphaël :

Wisdom is yours, and strength, and art of healing;
And three angelic hosts, behind you wheeling,
Haste to obey your orders joyfully.

If you want praise, then show some sense!
The heathen mock your impotence:

Praised I you now, they'd mock at me.

In his most bitter denunciations of Rome and of the clergy it is, in fact, the popes and not the papacy, priests and not the priesthood, that Walter von der Vogelweide attacks. He does, indeed, ask indignantly why, if the Pope be St. Peter's successor, he erases the apostle's doctrine from his books; and in one place he speaks of the donation of Constantine as the source of all the woes of the Church. But any attack on the papal idea would, at that period, have been an impossibility. Frederick the Second may, indeed, at one time, envying the subservience of the Oriental bishops to the Emperor of the East, have harboured the thought of establishing independent Churches in Germany and Apulia; but such an idea was too foreign to the whole tendency of Western Christendom to be as yet seriously entertained. The Pope to Walter is still the Lord's shepherd, though he is become a wolf among his flock;' he is God's treasurer, though, like a second Judas, he steals from the heavenly store; he is Christ's vicar, though he 'robs and slays with fire and sword!'

No account of Walter von der Vogelweide's religious attitude would be complete without mention of that wide tolerance which he shared with so many of the noblest minds of his age, and of which the Emperor Frederick the Second set so conspicuous an example. For it would seem that the Crusades, begun in a frenzy of fanatical zeal, had ended by inspiring the pilgrims with a certain respect for the character and culture of their unbelieving foes, and some regret that warriors so brave and chivalrous should be condemned to hopeless perdition. Frederick the Second had, indeed, not scrupled to draw down upon himself the censures of the Church by surrounding himself with Jewish and Saracen philosophers and men of letters, whose

services he employed to render into Latin the Arabic version of Aristotle, and other ancient or contemporary scientific works; he had made, when in Egypt, an advantageous treaty, on equal terms, with the Sultan of Egypt, and had even admitted him to the Christian order of chivalry; and if he did not always extend to heretics the protection which he gave to infidels, it was because to have done so would have been to endanger his throne, in helping to undermine those religious principles on which the medieval polity was based.

If such was the attitude of the emperor, that of the best of the poets, the true prophets of their age, was no less remarkable. At a time when the crusading spirit was only beginning to show signs of decline, when, in Germany, Konrad of Marburg, the cruel and fanatical tormentor of the saintly Elizabeth of Hungary, was travelling from town to town, putting hundreds to death on flimsy charges of heresy, and when the joyous civilisation of Provence was stamped out, in the name of religion, by the barbarous hordes of Simon de Montfort, it is strange indeed to come across such a passage as that which, in his epic of Willehalm, Wolfram von Eschenbach puts into the mouth of a Saracen woman :

The moral of mutual respect and toleration which Wolfram wrote his Willehalm to teach is enforced also by Walter von der Vogelweide, notably in a remarkable little poem in which he shows how, in the worship of God, 'Christians, Jews, and Heathen all agree.'

There is no doubt that the political and religious rhymes of Walter von der Vogelweide exercised a deep and wide-spread influence, serving as models for a host of imitators, who, like himself, wandered about Germany, and even beyond its borders, singing and reciting, and everywhere stirring up the national sentiment against the arrogant pretensions of a foreign power. These wandering minstrels were, in fact, in their various grades, to the middle ages what journalists and political agitators are to our own times. They not only represented, but had, in no small measure, a hand in creating

popular opinion; and of Walter von der Vogelweide in particular his enemies complained that he corrupted thousands by his poems.

Of Walter's private life little is known, save what may be gathered from his own works. After the death of his patron, Frederick the First of Austria (A.D. 1198), which closed the happy and careless period of his life at Vienna, he appears to have wandered from court to court, depending for a living on the precarious patronage of various princes, and that during a period when the civil wars can have left them little time or taste for art and artists. Like Erasmus, he was not ashamed to beg; and though, unlike Erasmus, he never stooped to solicit help by degrading flattery, the patrons who spared their money at his expense felt the lash of his tongue. Yet, in spite of prayers and scoldings, and of his vast popularity, he lived the greater part of his life a poor man, condemned, as he bitterly complains, to the existence of a mountebank, and depending for house and home on the hospitality of those whom he entertained. At last, however, the Emperor Frederick the Second rewarded his services with the grant of a small fief, and gave him a still more signal proof of his favour in entrusting to him the education of his young son, King Henry the Seventh. This latter charge, indeed, the intractable and perverse character of his pupil soon compelled him to resign, but without thereby forfeiting the goodwill of the emperor, through whose patronage the poet's declining years were preserved from want. He died about the year 1230, at Würzburg, near which his estate lay; and there his grave remains to the present time.

To the sterling and loveable qualities of Walter's character there are two trustworthy sources of evidence-his own poems and the witness of his contemporaries. In the former we have revealed to us a man who, in an age of storm and stress, kept his own judgment clear and unclouded; a man of deep religious feeling, yet of wide sympathies, scornful of mere superstition, and uncompromising in his opposition to the excessive ambitions of the priesthood; a poor man, who yet maintained his independence of speech; and one whose wit, in an age not over-refined, never descended to coarseness. And, amid all his cares and disappointments, one supreme satisfaction, denied to so many, he had—that of being appreciated at his full worth by his contemporaries. To his fellow-singers, indeed, he was the prince of minstrels, the Master ('unsers sanges meister'), as they loved to call him; and, when he died, many were found to celebrate his memory in song. Of which appreciations the simplest, and, by reason of its very simplicity, the most eloquent, is that of Hugo von Trimberg :Her Walter von der Vogelweide, Wer des vergaes' der taet mir leide!

Sir Walter von der Vogelweide,
I pity them that him forget!

WALTER ALISON PHILLIPS.

1896

THE MATRIARCHAL FAMILY SYSTEM

THE recollections of the older among us go back to a generation before there was any serious disturbance of the belief that the primitive family life of mankind was of patriarchal type. In its simplest form, the family was held to have consisted of the father with his wife or wives, and their children living under his control and bound together by common descent from him; this small group. expanding in successive generations into larger groups, when the younger families remained under the headship of the eldest ancestor, unless and until they separated from the parent stock and set up independent households. A social framework of this kind was indeed the only one which fitted into general ancient and modern history.. Its liveliest pictures were drawn from the traditions of ancient. manners in the Bible, whence we have the word patriarch, the Greek designation of the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel in 1 Chronicles xxvii. 22. So far as society in the great ancient nations of the East and West was known, it was laid out more or less rigidly on such lines, and though modern European life did not conform to the stringency of paternal power belonging to old Roman law, it plainly bore the impress of the ancient order in the position of the male line as to authority, descent, succession, and inheritance.

It gave the scholarly world a shock when thirty years ago the Scotch advocate John Ferguson McLennan published in his book on Primitive Marriage a theory intended to upset the received patriarchal views, which had just been set forth with especial force and strictness in Maine's Ancient Law. McLennan brought forward a collection of evidence as to ancient and modern peoples accustomed to trace their descent not on the father's but the mother's side. This custom he argued to be a relic of the primitive state of the human race, when as yet there was no fixed marriage, so that paternity was not recognised as a social tie, but maternity furnished the only relation on which kinship could be founded and the family held together. This work brought into notice an earlier treatise on Mother-right, the Swiss jurist Bachofen's Mutterrecht, in which a similar doctrine had been propounded. The theory of primitive matrimonial anarchy thus set in circulation was in after years.

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