SOURCE: "Conscience and the Aesthetic in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Plautus im Nonnenkloster," in Michigan Germanic Studies, Vol. XI, No. 2, Fall, 1985, pp. 159-81.

[In the following essay, Rowland analyzes the interweaving of structure, motifs, and narrative perspective in Meyer's novella.]

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Plautus im Nonnenkloster has been called [by Alfred Zäch, in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer: Dichtkunst als Befreiung aus Lebenshemmnissen, 1973] "ein Kleinod der Novellenkunst . . . in formaler Hinsicht makellos, höchst reizvoll als ästhetisches Spiel und doch nicht ohne menschlichen Gehalt . . ." Significantly, this praise is lavished more on the form than on the content of the work. Indeed, Meyer's story of an Italian humanist who delivers a codex of Plautine comedies and a vital Swiss girl from a convent has generally been regarded as superficial. The tenacity of this view is due in part, perhaps, to the author's own apparent assessment of the tale, which he once described as "ein Novellchen, das zwar nicht viel zu bedeuten hat, aber solid gebaut ist." In any case the work has received far less individual scholarly attention than many other Novellen, including the formally less felicitous Die Richterin.

While stressing the formal success of Plautus, Meyer also adverted to a more substantive aspect of its content: "In den drei Figuren sind die drei hist. Bedingungen der Reformation, in komischer Maske verkörpert: Die Verweltlichung des hohen Klerus" (Poggio), "die Verthierung der niedrigen Geistlichkeit" (Brigittchen), and the "ehrliche [n] Fond in der deutschen Volksnatur (Gertrud), ohne welchen die Reformation eine Unmöglichkeit gewesen wäre." Certain recent critics, not content with the author's historical emphasis, have placed the tale squarely in the context of his whole lifework, seeing it in a surprisingly complex expression of the relationship between conscience and the aesthetic. These scholars are also unanimous in their perception of a decidedly negative criticism of the humanist Poggio and his aestheticism. They are at one in their assertion of a fundamental criticism of the aesthetic on the part of Meyer's implied narrator and thus in the work as a whole. At the same time, they are divided on the specific nature and presentation of Poggio's experience and conduct, which, of course, have a decisive bearing on the total statement of the work.

This lack of consensus stems largely from a failure to account adequately for the central complex of theatrical motifs and to relate it to the structure of the plot and implied narrator's usage of irony. Accordingly I propose to take a closer look at Meyer's complex of motifs and plot as they develop over the internal story as well as the narrative perspectives provided by both frame and internal stories. Such an approach uncovers a more positive attitude toward Poggio and the aesthetic than that allowed by recent critics, indeed, an intimate, if still problematic, relationship between art and morality in Meyer's work.

At the beginning of the frame story the narrator relates that a group of cultivated Florentines has assembled around Cosimo de' Medici for an evening of conviviality. However, it is not Cosimo, but Poggio whose gray hair is conspicious among them and whose eloquence rivets their attention. Together with his age and polished conversation a strangely mixed expression of cheerfulness and sorrow distinguishes him from his companions. Thus, Poggio is immediately set apart from the rest of the company and with good reason. As secretary of the Florentine Republic and, earlier, of five popes, as author of the popular Facetien and discoverer of Plautus' comedies, he has grown old in the service of state, Church and art. In addition to these distinctions, he has also suffered a well-known personal misfortune. All of his sons, while highly gifted, have become ne'er-do-wells. One even committed an act bordering on theft which not only cost Poggio a serious financial sacrifice but also cast the shadow of disgrace over his old age.

The contrast between Poggio and the other Florentines grows sharper when Cosimo asks him to tell a Facezia inedita. Thoroughly familiar with the witty and racy Facetien, based on experiences of the author's youth, Cosimo can now enjoy only the "schlanken Wendungen einer glücklichen Form," but can no longer experience curiosity and surprise. He seeks to entice him by adding that the circle of friends will understand the most subtle allusion and pardon the boldest jest. "Erzählend und schlürfend," moreover, Poggio will forget his sorrow. Poggio jokes initially in the spirit of the group, but his reluctance to return to those "Possen" and "Jugendlichkeiten" is clear. For, as harmless as they may have been at base, his open-mindedness and easygoing philosophy of life appear to have degenerated in his son to profligacy by some uncanny law of progression.

At this point, Romolo accuses Poggio of preaching, referring to the fact that it is he who has given the comedies of Plautus back to the world. Poggio thanks him for the reminder and promises to regale his listeners with a Facetie entitled Der Fund des Plautus. However, a scoffer interjects that he should call it the Raub des Plautus instead. Unperturbed, Poggio expresses the hope that his tale will both entertain his companions and rid them of the notion perpetuated by the envious that he had stolen the codex. He goes on to say that his Facetie has to do with two crosses, a heavy and a light one, and with two barbarian nuns, a novice and an abbess. Ippolito interrupts him in glee over the prospect of hearing more of the "treuherzigen germanischen Vestalen" who filled the baths on the Limmat in an earlier letter from abroad. But Poggio says that he had exaggerated, adding that the youth, as an admirer of ingenuousness, will enjoy his barbarian nun nevertheless.

Through the contrast between Poggio and his companions Meyer develops the theme of conscience and the aesthetic from the very beginning of the work. The Florentines reveal an Epicurean attitude toward life and its artistic representation and experience all but devoid of any existential or ethical dimension. As Cosimo's words suggest, they have reduced the episodes of Poggio's youth as well as the creation and reception of art in general to the level of pleasurable, even frivolous form and to a means of escaping the problems of life. For Romolo, somber experiential substance and instruction have no place within the purview of art. Ippolito completely overlooks the potential seriousness of a story dealing with religious symbols and figures. Even the scoffer's objection to the title of the Facetie appears to stem more from cynicism than from moral indignation, as the smiles following Poggio's mild protest imply.

Now, Poggio is highly sensitive to the importance of entertainment in art and life. After all, he is the author of the formally sophisticated, risqué Facetien. Just as he had exaggerated the nuns in his letter from abroad, he may well have excluded the present story from the collection in consideration of his readers' taste. And now he responds to the reminder of his social responsibility by eschewing further mention of his private concerns. It is small wonder that the Florentines treat him as a most illustrious member of a group of kindred spirits.

Nevertheless, Poggio distances himself subtly from his friends and their views and, in the process, from his own past. He refers to the tales of his youth as farces which Cosimo may relish but which he himself no longer savors. Furthermore, he relates the context of his story in a parody of the verbose argument typical of the opening of Italian novellas such as his own. His tale of a simple, barbarian nun may well entertain Ippolito, but not, as he knows, in the way his young friend expects. Here, Poggio creates distance by means of irony. For through the fate of his sons he has apparently sensed that the attitudes of his companions and his youth are somehow unequal to the exigencies of life and art. On the other hand, he has learned that they are entirely capable of prejudicing his integrity. In his Facetie, therefore, he intends at once to please and instruct his audience, to do justice to the demands of conscience and the aesthetic and at the same time to defend his rectitude in an entertaining fashion.

Despite Poggio's implicit appeal to Horace's time-honored concept of the poet, the subjective aspect of his edificatory intent immediately renders his endeavor open to doubt. And his friends' reservations toward his character are not at all without foundation. The narrator relates that Poggio is not only a statesman, artist, and humanist but was also a cleric who exchanged his collar for a wife and family. He allows Poggio to disclose without a blink that he was quite prepared to adorn truth in order to please his readers. By endowing him with an ambivalent countenance, moreover, he suggests that Poggio is fundamentally divided within himself. Just as Poggio distances himself from other Florentines, the narrator steps back from his protagonist. Accordingly, the reader must anticipate Poggio's tale with a certain degree of skepticism.

Poggio indeed seeks to resolve seeming antitheses—entertainment and instruction, art and life, conscience and the aesthetic. This is at least in effect the intention of Meyer and his narrator as well. Whether the nature and results of the two enterprises are ultimately the same, however, remains to be seen.

In Poggio's tale, as in the frame story, the thematic constellation of conscience and the aesthetic is established at the very outset. Poggio is in Constance to participate in the ecumenical council called to unify and reform the Church and to elect a new pope. Contrary to what one might expect of a man of the cloth, however, he divides his idle hours "zwischen der Betrachtung des ergötzlichen Schauspiels, das auf der beschränkten Bühne einer deutschen Reichsstadt die Frömmigkeit, die Wissenschaft, die Staatskunst des Jahrhunderts mit seinen Päpsten, Ketzern, Gauklern und Buhlerinnen zusammendrängte,—und der gelegentlichen Suche nach Manuskripten in den umliegenden Klöstern." Significantly, the Constance of the council presents itself to Poggio as theater, as comedy, with a delightful, contradictory mixture of the highest and lowest, the best and worst of society. Similarly, it is a codex of Plautine comedies that he learns is in a nearby convent and determines to obtain. Indeed, he leaves Constance to search for it despite the rapidly approaching papal election.

Poggio's questionable enthusiasm controls more than two-thirds of the entire tale. He sets out for the convent in exuberant anticipation, hearing "die Musen und die Englein" singing—one of many passages in which he mixes elements of antiquity and Christianity. To pass the time and "aus Menschenliebe," he gives his tristful companion, Hans, a number of riddles to solve, in which biblical figures play quite human roles. On learning that Hans's melancholy and eventual tears stem from his beloved's imminent entry into the convent, he exclaims in delight, "Bei dem Bogen Cupidos . . . ein unglücklich Liebender!", as if having unexpectedly discovered some lost romantic comedy: He listens, to be sure, as Hans relates the circumstances surrounding his engagement to Gertrude and her inexplicable decision to take the veil. Yet, afterward, he simply inquires about the character of the abbess, his philanthropy apparently not extending to charity.

Poggio experiences his first encounter with Brigittchen and the Scheinwunder, like Constance, as comic theater. Indeed, the "Szene" on the cloister meadow is depicted in much the same way as the earlier one, if in greater detail. Laymen and monks, peasants and noblemen, ballad-mongers, gypsies, and prostitutes—again, a colorful mixture of the high and low and the good and evil of society—surround a group of nuns who, in turn, encircle a tattered soldier blowing a trumpet, the abbess, and a gigantic cross. However, the tone of this scene is markedly different. The spectators stand "in den traulichsten Stellungen"; each attempts to bear the cross and fails to the shouts and laughter of the others. Brigittchen dances around like one possesed, inspired like the rest by the convent wine, and praises the miracle of the cross like a circus barker. Poggio describes her as a "Hanswürstin" and the whole scene as a "possierlichen Vorgang." And, indeed, it is portrayed like some pagan ritual in low comic form, a bacchanal in which the cross takes the place of the phallus. Poggio finds the whole "Ärgernis" repugnant, all the more so when Brigittchen challenges him mockingly to lift the cross with his own weak arms and, alerted by an inept predecessor, accuses him of dishonest intentions.

Seeking refuge from the laughter of the crowd, Poggio enters the nearby church and finds Gertrude kneeling before the statue of a powerful woman struggling under the weight of an immense cross and aided by a smaller female figure. Asked to interpret the image, Gertrude says that it represents a duchess of long ago, the founder of the convent, and the Virgin Mary. According to tradition, the woman had poisoned her husband and escaped secular justice owing to her high station. Eventually despairing of her salvation, however, she took vows and underwent a long period of atonement. In hopes of a sign of forgiveness, she had a cross made which even the strongest man could scarcely lift and sought to bear it during her investiture. The Virgin indeed lightened it upon her shoulder and, as we learn later, has since favored every novitiate in the same manner.

Gertrude then explains her decision to renounce Hans and take the veil. As a young girl, she had promised herself to the Virgin for her twentieth year if the Virgin would heal her hopelessly ill mother. Since her mother indeed recovered and her vow has come due, she is now preparing to fulfill it. In the meantime, it is true, she has fallen in love with Hans. She often thinks that the Virgin would not hold an innocent child to its word and would likely have cured her mother without obligation. While the sinful duchess was happy in the convent, moreover, she herself would be sick at heart: "Trägst du mir das Kreuz, so erleichtere mir auch das Herz," she prays, "sonst gibt es ein Unglück . . .". Nevertheless, she intends to keep her pledge, for "Handel ist Handel . . . Ehrlich währt am längsten . . . Ohne Treu und Glauben kann die Welt nicht bestehen."

On hearing Gertrude's simple but earnest and foreboding story, Poggio suggests with a cunning smile that a clever girl could extricate herself from the matter by slipping and admires her youthful arms "mit künstlerischem Vergnügen." When she leaves in indignation, he sits down in the confessional, his mind on Plautus rather than Gertrude and her plight. He then realizes in sudden exultation that the miracle of the cross must in fact be a sham. While conceding that the duchess Amalaswinta may well have borne the heavy cross with the strength of despair and fervor, he is convinced that the abbesses have since substituted a much lighter Gaukelkreuz for it. Based on this conviction and the discussion of monastic reform in a commission of the council on which he sits as secretary, he contrives his own scheme to wrest the codex from Brigittchen. Meanwhile, he locates the convent library and enters, "nicht anders als wäre ich ein verliebter Jüngling und beträte die Kammer Lydias oder Glyceras . . . und hätte ich . . . die Komödien des Umbriers gefunden, ich bedeckte sie mit unersättlichen Küssen." Once again, Poggio expresses his excitement through an allusion to romantic comedy, this time with more explicitly erotic overtones. His ardor is dampened, however, when he finds "nur" rituals and liturgies among the books. His only "Beute" is a copy of St. Augustine's Confessions, which he has always loved because of its captiousness.

Poggio gives little better account of himself in the scene that follows. Brigittchen surprises him with the volume under his robe and accuses him of planning to steal the "Pickelhering" or "Possenreisser," which she hopes to sell in order to buy a barn or wine press for the convent. Inspired by the "Nähe des versteckten komischen Dichters," however, he assumes the mien of a Church father, unfolds a stately innkeeper's bill, and pretends to read a decree condemning immoral reading and false miracles in the nunneries. Brigittchen turns pale but, drawing on her own admirable presence of mind, as Poggio calls it, praises the council's reformatory zeal and feigns compliance by handing him the most evil book she can think of—his own Facetien. Beginning to hate the abbess, Poggio threatens her with death at the stake, should the miracle prove spurious, and ultimately intimidates her into revealing the counterfeit cross. However, an involuntary exclamation of admiration for its artistry gives him away. While conceding defeat and promising to give him the codex, Brigittchen laughs cynically, as if to say, "Wir alle wissen, wo Bartolo den Most holt, wir sind Schelme allesamt und keiner braucht sich zu zieren."

Poggio's growing disgust and longing "nach dem unschuldigen Spiele der Muse" lead him to put a quick and characteristic end to the affair. He determines to spare Brigittchen, both to uphold the reputation of the Church, as he says, and to prevent his own exposure. He makes her vow to burn the false cross, only, however, after the forthcoming performance of the miracle, which, "aus Klugheitsgründer," he dares not prevent. On receiving the codex, he rushes her away and locks himself in his room. When she returns and, fearing discovery, demands the key to the chamber concealing the Gaukelkreuz, he says that he does not have it, which, while literally true, is false insofar as he knows where it is. Allowing her to lament like a soul in Purgatory, he luxuriates "im Himmel des höchsten Genusses . . . in hochzeitlichen Wonnen."

At this point in Poggio's story, which precedes a decisive turn in the plot, it will be useful to pause to reflect and expand upon our observations. The relationship between conscience and the aesthetic manifests itself primarily through the symbolic usage of theater. As Poggio's descriptions of Constance and the bacchanal and response to his fellow man attest, the theater is a cipher for a fundamental mode of experience and action. He observes the spectacle in Constance, refuses to be drawn into the exhibition on the meadow, and stands aloof from Hans and Gertrude and their concerns. That is to say, Poggio typically witnesses the unfolding of events and character from the psychological and emotional distance of a spectator. He extorts the codex from Brigittchen by means of what amounts to an improvised comic intrigue, His is an intuitive, spontaneous nature; his riddles occur to him "aus dem Nichts," while he hides the key to the chamber with the counterfeit cross "ohne bestimmten Plan." Poggio's experience of life from an inner remove and instinctive behavior are intimately related. Involved more with himself than with the world and the people about him, he acts, if at all, not on principle but on his own interest according to the demands of the moment and with ethically questionable results.

Poggio is not so different from Brigittchen as his condescension toward her suggests he thinks. To be sure, she is "ein garstiges, kleines Weib." Through her drunken display on the meadow she makes a travesty of herself and the cross. Discovering Poggio in the library, she gropes about his robe in an unseemly manner and later, on hearing the tittering whispers of her nuns, takes leave of him with an oath on her virginity. Accepting the rationalization of her predecessor and confessor, she ingenuously seeks to justify the pseudo miracle as a symbol of the initial difficulty and later ease of a pious life and asserts in one breath that she has committed no wrong and that as a child she too had once been honest. On the other hand, she is a masterful administrator. Like the abbesses before her, she views the Scheinwunder as the financial salvation of the convent and has indeed restored it and her nuns to prosperity, which lends her deception an at least tangentially religious and quite considerable human justification. Here is a solid, if unenlightened and secularized faith.

Poggio, for his part, is doubtless morally superior to Brigittchen in one central respect. He clearly recognizes the hypocrisy of the false miracle and scorns her specious attempt to vindicate it. At the same time, his scorn is compounded not only of righteous indignation but of quite human anger over her witting and unwitting assaults on his own virtue. And, of course, he is not free of hypocrisy himself. He laughs up his sleeve over the earnestness of the Church fathers' discussion of abuses in the nunneries, yet affects such solemnity in his plot to get the codex. He is often no more concious of his sanctimony than the abbess. After recounting his expression of admiration for the counterfeit cross, he adds that he was extolling not the fraud, but the art expended on it, unaware that they amount to the same thing. His revulsion over the bacchanal is attributable in part precisely to its crass, unaesthetic nature. However, there is something distinctly pagan and orgiastic about the manner in which he pursues and enjoys the Plautus-codex. Poggio's aestheticism and Brigittchen's materialism are but two different aspects of the same, broad secularization of religion and morality and are related to each other symbolically through the false cross. At different levels of sophistication, the humanist's improvisational theater is at least as questionable as the nun's partly unintentional burlesque and, in view of his treatment of her, is certainly more inhumane.

The dubiety of Poggio's aesthetic mode of existence is most evident in his initial encounter with Gertrude. Her religiosity and morality are of coarser fabric than his, it is true. While he concedes the plausibility of the legend of Amalaswinta, she states uncategorically, "Sie ist wahr!" She displays naiveté befitting her peasantry in her rationalizations with the Virgin and use of folk sayings to explain her decision to take the veil. There is a stubborn individualism about her matched only by her powerful ties to everyday life. However, the rough texture of her faith and ethics is their very strength. Owing to it, she is quite willing to undergo the ordeal of the cross at the cost of total self-denial and at the risk of self-annihilation. Far from representing egoistic casuistry, as has been claimed, her unsophisticated reasoning heightens the probity of her resolution to honor her vow. She is the only one of the three major characters in the work who is spared Meyer's irony. Like the rude statue in the church, in front of which Poggio first sees her, she is "etwas in seiner Weise Schönes." According to her measure of humanity, she offers a model of faith and integrity before which Poggio pales. He discerns only her sturdy physical beauty and is prepared to sacrifice her to preserve his dignity and that of the Church. While she readies herself for a heavenly wedding which may mean her destruction, he revels in the sublimely carnal ecstasy of aesthetic gratification.

Poggio reveals himself to have been a man of the Renaissance cast entirely in the mold of Cosimo and the other Florentines—devoted to the culture of antiquity and possessed of a cavalier attitude toward the Church and its sphere of concern. For him, life is a theater in which one may enjoy the comic plot from the balcony, perhaps even perform for a time, and then return to one's seat as one likes. Should it momentarily contradict its nature and intrude upon one's tranquility, one can flee into the purer comedy of art. This, of course, is precisely what happens in the first part of Poggio's story. The circumstances of his acquisition of the Plautus-codex form an essentially self-contained farce with beginning, middle, and end—a kind of Verwechslungskomödie complete with Zwillingsmotif in small. At the same time, this portion of the story represents the first act of quite another piece. It is no accident that Poggio responds to Hans's tears with an allusion to romantic comedy, for Hans and Gertrude, like the young lovers of the genre, encounter an obstacle to the fulfillment of their love. However, the typical blocking character, an intransigent parent, is eliminated prior to the beginning of the action through the timely death of Hans's malicious stepmother. The obstacle that rises in her place is of a different and far more formidable sort—conscience, Gertrude's own unbending moral character, compounded by the immorality of the abbess' deception, which threaten to make a tragedy of the piece. Poggio, already acting out of a self-indulgent scenario more demanding than he anticipated, is totally indifferent to the development of a drama for which his experience has so ill prepared him. By the conclusion of his intrigue to obtain the codex, his attempt to vindicate his honor has grown more complex than at the outset and is very much in jeopardy.

Despite all shortcomings, Poggio's aestheticism discloses positive potential. On entering the church following the scene on the meadow, he finds Romanesque arches and vaults, rather than the fashionable Gothic, and regains his clear and peaceful state of mind. He is thus able to be moved by the despair and pity expressed on the faces of the statue. In the midst of his intrigue he sees the real cross leaning against a wall, "so gewältig . . . als hätte heute erst eine verzweifelnde grosse Sünderin es ergriffen und wäre darunter ins Knie gesunken, die Steinplatte schon mit der Stime berührend in dem Augenblicke da die Himmelskönigin erschien und ihr beistand." Unlike Constance and the bacchanal, the legend of Amalaswinta evoked by the cross strikes Poggio with dramatic immediacy. Unable to lift it an inch, he senses the absurdity of the sacrilege all the more and grows firmer in his resolve to find the hidden imitation. If all-pervasive and subject to cultural chauvinism, Poggio's aesthetic sensibilty makes him receptive to religious and moral values as well as to art and is capable of spurring him to corresponding action.

We saw earlier that Poggio's aestheticism is accompanied by a certain rational skepticism. While Gertrude expresses naive faith in the miracle of the cross, Poggio states that it could be true and seeks a logical explanation for it. His skepticism is double-edged, however, for it concedes possibilty at the same time as it questions actuality. He says of the miraculous, "Ich denke . . . lässlich davon, weder abergläubig noch verwegen; denn ich mag die absoluten Geister nicht leiden, welche, wo eine unerklärliche Tatsache einen Dunstkreis von Aberglauben um sich sammelt, die ganze Erscheinung . . . ohne Prüfung und Unterscheidung entweder summarisch glauben oder eben so summarisch verwerfen." To the extent that it remains accessible to the undemonstrable, his skepticism is entirely compatible with his intuitive, aesthetic nature. And, indeed, Poggio describes the miracle as a combination of "das Unbegreifliche" and "Betrug," his procurement of the codex as the result of a "Verschwörung von Gelegenheiten." In fact, a number of apparent coincidences leads to his acquisition of the comedies: the chance proximity of the council to the cloister and presence of the codex there, the accidental manner in which he surmises its location, the fortuity of Hans's becoming his traveling companion, the existence of a counterfeit cross and a commission concerned with false miracles and illicit reading, and Brigittchen's giving him his own Facetien, which prompts him to redouble his efforts to settle the matter. After telling of his hiding the key to the chamber with the false cross, Poggio says, "So aber tat ich . . . auf die Einflüsterung irgend eines Gottes oder einer Göttin." Despite the obligatory allusion to antiquity, he at once foreshadows things to come and implies the possible working of divinity in this conspiracy of opportunities. His aestheticism and skepticism are thus open both to religious and moral values and to the possibility of their transcendental foundation.

The scene which brings a decisive turn in Poggio's story is structured initially by the same contrast between conscience and the aesthetic observed earlier. Poggio digresses momentarily to comment on the significance of the newly secured codex: "Ein an das Licht tretender Klassiker und nicht ein dunkler Denker, ein erhabener Dichter, nein das Nächstliegende und ewig Fesselnde, die Weltbreite, der Puls des Lebens, das Marktgelächter von Rom und Athen, Witz und Wortwechsel und Wortspiel, die Leidenschaften, die Frechheit der Menschennatur in der mildernden Übertreibung des komischen Zerrspiegels—während ich ein Stück verschlang, hütete ich schon mit heisshungrigen Blicken das folgende." Having finished the first piece, he pauses to rest his eyes and becomes aware of a group of girls outside singing the refrain, "In das Kloster geh'ich nicht, / Nein, ein Nönnchen werd' ich nicht . . . ." He knows full well that they are taunting Gertrude and even pictures her in the sacristy preparing for her heavenly wedding. Asking rhetorically, "Doch was kümmerte mich das?"; however, he turns to the next work and once again abandons himself to orgiastic pleasure.

All the same, his attitude soon changes radically. Falling into a restless slumber, he finds himself surrounded by familiar comic figures, among them a braggart soldier and a pair of young lovers. But then, "unversehens—mitten unter dem lustigen, antiken Gesindel stand eine barfüssige, breitschultrige Barbarin, mit einem Stricke gegürtet, als Sklavin zu Markte gebracht, wie es schien, unter finsteren Brauen hervor mich anstarrend mit vorwurfsvollen und drohenden Augen." Poggio starts from his sleep in fright to hear a monotone invocation passing over into a stifled groan and then into a violent cry from the nearby church. Telling himself that something must have come over Gertrude while he was reading, he goes to the sacristy and finds her before the cross pleading with the Virgin to spare her: "Mir schaudert vor der Zelle . . . Was mir taugt . . . ist Sonne und Wolke, Sichel und Sense, Mann und Kind . . . ." Poggio can still smile at this very human confession to the Intemerata, but his smile suddenly dies on his lips. For Getrude leaps to her feet and continues, "Lass mich unter deinem Kreuze sinken, es ist mir zu schwer! Erleichterst du mir's aber auf der Schulter, ohne mir das Herz erleichtern zu können, da siehe zu . . . dass sie mich eines Morgens nicht mit zerschmettertem Schädel auflesen!". Faced unexpectedly with the unequivocal possibility of Gertrude's suicide, Poggio responds immediately, "Ein unendliches Mitleid ergriff mich, aber nicht Mitleid allein, sondern auch eine beklemmende Angst"—all the more so when he recognizes approaching madness in the way she plaits her loosened braids and varies the little girls' refrain in an unnatural child's voice: "In das Kloster geh' ich ein/Muss ein armes Nönnchen sein . . . ."

At this point, the "Optimus Maximus" uses Poggio as his instrument and bids him save Gertrude at any cost. Turning "in freier Frömmigkeit" to the virgin goddess called Athena by the ancients and Mary by his contemporaries, he prays, "Wer du seist . . . die Weisheit, wie die einen sagen, die Barmherzigkeit, wie die anderen behaupten,—gleichviel, die Weisheit überhört das Gelöbnis eines weltunerfahrenen Kindes und die Barmherzigkeit fesselt keine Erwachsene an das törichte Versprechen einer Unmündigen. Lächelnd lösest du das nichtige Gelübde. Deine Sache führe ich, Göttin. Sei mir gnädig. Having promised the abbess to have no further contact with Gertrude, Poggio determines to suggest the truth to her "in antiker Art" by performing three symbolic actions so clear that even an unsophisticated peasant girl could understand them. As if unaware of her presence and employing comic language and gestures, he cuts a notch in the cross and then intimates both the lightness and location of its false counterpart. Recognizing the first signs of flaming anger in her expression, he returns to his room and enjoys the sweet slumber of a good conscience.

Poggio's dream assumes a form closely resembling his descriptions of Constance, the scene on the meadow, and the comedies of Plautus. For it presents explicitely or by implication the same varied mixture of social and moral types—the same microcosm of life—depicted in the earlier passages. Gertrude's appearance as a reproachful slave girl brought to market to the laughter of the ancient mob may at first seem to introduce a new, darker element into this world. However, the shadowy side of life is at least implicit in the heretics, charlatans, and prostitutes in Constance as well as in the passions and impertinence of human nature and the market laughter typical of Plautine comedy. And it is manifest in the scene on the meadow, where the cross is exhibited in an expressly carnival atmosphere accompanied by Dionysian overtones. Here, the cross together with all it stands for—utmost personal integrity, self-sacrifice for higher principles, the salvation of humanity—is debased, as it were, enslaved and put on the block for essentially materialistic ends. In Poggio's dream, life and art merge into a theatrical whole in which their full range of possibilities, their tragic as well as comic potential, becomes transparent. And through the inner truth of dream the cross and Gertrude undergo a metaphorical union which imposes their common, if peculiar, sanctity and jeopardy on Poggio with pressing urgency. Poggio and his conscience are awakened with a jolt, for the imperiled sacredness of Christianity as well as human life has taken on a congenial aesthetic form. The visual drama of his dream and then the sound of Gertrude's cry of despair rouse him from his characteristic indifference and at the same time turn the plot of his story in a new direction.

Content earlier to leave Gertrude to her fate, Poggio now actively seeks her in the sacristy of the church. And there, the stark reality of her desperate situation bursts upon him with full force, for through the sight and sound of her latently suicidal "Ringkampfe mit der Gottheit" she presents him with living drama. If stirred in different ways and degrees by the statue in the church and the slave girl of his dream, he now reacts to Gertrude, the vital human being, with pity and fear, the traditional categories of audience response to tragedy. In the same heightened state of receptivity he sees her braiding her hair, hears her singing her refrain, and thus perceives the onset of madness in her. At this moment, aesthetic form and living experience converge to imbue Poggio with a keen sense of the existential fullness of another individual. Similarly, they infuse him with an acute awareness of the exigencies of conscience and art, for they compel him to act and, what is more, to do so within an entirely aesthetic mode. As suggested by the allusion to the commedia dell'arte in the name of his cutler, Pantaleone Ubbriaco, Poggio's three symbolic actions in antiker Art correspond to the three acts of comedy in general and represent an intrigue much like the one executed against the abbess. While acting earlier on largely egoistic motives, however, he now proceeds altruistically in the spirit of Gertrude and the cross.

The obstacle to the union of the young lovers indeed proves formidable and potentially tragic, for in concert with Brigittchen's deception Gertrude's moral integrity, the very best within her, threatens to become her ruin. By thwarting the abbess' intrigue with one of his own, however, Poggio holds out the prospect of a comic resolution. In this, the climax of the work, his aesthetic relationship to life reveals itself capable of embracing and overcoming tragedy as well as comedy, both in himself and others.

Poggio's inner life at the confluence of antiquity and modernity does not permit him to put a clear label on the ultimate source of his inspiration. The expression Optimus Maximus refers to the greatest Good of both ages and to the traditional final instance of neither. In turning to the goddess called Athena by the one and Mary by the other, he again mixes elements of the two cultures. His piety is indeed frei, for he identifies with both eras and more with their values than with their institutions. Piety it is nonetheless, and in his own way Poggio prays just as earnestly as Gertrude. If unable to disclose the specific shape of the absolute, his mode of experience enables him to recognize its existence and to draw upon its substance. And whatever their particular origin, the wisdom and mercy both embodied by Athena and Mary, by the mitigating exaggeration of ancient and modern comedy and the cross of Christianity, suggest a fundamental identity of the values of the two worlds as a positive force in human affairs. Poggio has good reason to sleep well, for he has loosened the bonds not only of Gertrude and the cross but of Plautus and the broad moral spirit of art as well. His mode of life is not only open to conscience, but is also capable of being filled by it.

The scene depicting Gertrude's ordeal evinces the same emotional intensity as the preceding one but has an entirely different tone. While dressing for the ceremony, she dons the crown of thorns so forcefully that blood spurts forth and runs down over her forehead. "Ein erhabener Zorn, ein göttliches Gericht" blaze from her eyes and begin to frighten the nuns assisting her. "Jetzt," in Poggio's words, "entwickelte sich alles rasch wie ein Gewitter." Finding the cross given her unmarked, Gertrude smashes it jubilantly on the floor of the sacristy and gets the true one from the chamber that normally conceals the Gaukelkreuz and which due to Poggio's deception the abbess has been unable to lock. Lifting it to her shoulder in triumph, she ignores the wailing abbess and her nuns and sets off with the words, "Jetzt, Muttergottes, schlichte du den Handel ehrlich!" She then enters the choir before an immense assembly of clergy, nobility, and peasantry waiting breathlessly in the spacious nave. Much as Poggio had earlier imagined Amalaswinta's procession, she attempts to continue with all her might, but slowly sinks under the weight of her burden and finally crashes unconcious with it onto the floor to the collective sigh of all present.

In view of the feverish pitch and pace of these events, what follows represents a drastic change. On regaining her senses, Gertrude discerns Hans in the silent crowd and asks whether he wants her as his wife. Receiving an affirmative reply, she joins him in the nave and disappears together with him. Initially entranced and then nonplused, the people in the crowd now argue furiously over the unexpected invalidation of the miracle, the men condemning the abbess and the women denouncing Gertrude. When Brigittchen begins to retort in kind, the faces of the clergymen reveal "eine vollständige Stufenleiter von einverstandener Schlauheit bis zu der redlichsten Dummheit." Informed meanwhile of developments in Constance, Poggio ends the "Ärgernis" by announcing the election of the new pope and intoning a Te Deum. Afterward, the crowd disperses and all hasten to the city, where, as Poggio says, "der nach Beendigung des Triregnum urbi und orbi gespendete Segen dreifach kräftig wirken musste." On leaving the convent, the Plautus-codex under his arm, Poggio encounters the thrifty Brigittchen carrying the pieces of the false cross in a large basket and congratulates her ironically "zu der Lösung des Knotens." She tells him to go to the devil together with the other Italian rogue, whereupon he himself returns to Constance.

After announcing the end of his story, Poggio relates that on the trip back to Italy he met Hans and Gertrude together with their child as the proprietors of an inn. He now presents Cosimo with the codex and offers his Facezìa inedita as a supplement. He intended, he says, to bequeath it to him in his will but gives it to him now for fear that his sons might not respect his last wish. Cosimo accepts the gifts with the words, "Ich danke dir für beides, deinen Plautus und deine Facetie. Skrupellos hast du sie gelebt und ausgeführt, jung wie du damals warest. Als ein Gereifter hast du sie uns erzählt mit der Weisheit deiner Jahre." He then raises a fine chalice enclasped by a laughing satyr and toasts Poggio and his blonde barbarian. Here, amid drinking and laughter, the conversation turns from Plautus to the "tausend gehobenen Horte und aufgerollten Pergamente des Altertums und auf die Grösse des Jahrhunderts."

Gertrude's procession presents itself in the theatrical manner of the earlier mass scenes, from Constance to Poggio's dream, but ensues with inner necessity from the foregoing dramatic climax. She gives the crowd "das ergreifende Schauspiel" of her struggle from the "offener Bühne" of the choir in the church. Poggio says of her triumphant collapse, "Das war die blutige Wahrheit, nicht der gaukelnde Trug." For a brief but extended and intense moment he and the others watch her as if transfixed. As soon as she returns to Hans and everyday life, however,—that is to say, as soon as the denouement to which Poggio refers is complete—the spectators return to a state of normalcy as well. Only moments before sighing as one, the people in the church now offer the same varied, contradictory picture as in earlier scenes. And Poggio, who made a comic resolution of the tragic conflict possible, can now say, "Verlache mich, Cosimo! Ich war enttäuscht." Indeed, he, too, reverts to his former self. Much as in his intrigue against the abbess, he uses his priesthood consciously—"Ich fühlte mich als Kleriker"—to end the renewed Ärgernis, likening the termination of the triregnum and the new pope's blessing to the conclusion of some unholy comedy, he again speaks flippantly of religious affairs. Moreover, he once again treats Brigittchen in a manner ill-becoming his office.

In view of this reappearance of moral laxity in his conduct one is justified in asking whether or to what extent Poggio has succeeded in his attempt to vindicate himself and to unite conscience and the aesthetic. Has he truly been affected by the experience of his youth and become a mature man, as Cosimo states? A return to the narrative perspectives discussed earlier will prove instructive.

Poggio distances himself from his companions and past at various points in his tale as well as in the frame story. After relating Gertrude's account of the original miracle, for example, he states that she used not his words, but rather simple, crude ones, which could not be translated into cultivated Tuscan without becoming churlish and grotesque. He then adds, "und das, Herrschaften, würde hinwiederum nicht passen zu dem grossen Ausdrucke der trotzigen blauen Augen und der groben, aber wohlge-formten Züge, wie ich sie damals vor mir gesehen habe." While betraying something of his cultural chauvinism, Poggio also implies that his sophisticated language is itself incapable of capturing the inner truth of Gertrude's uncultivated German and personal presence. Later, he introduces his comments on the miraculous with the words, "Ich weiss nicht, mein Cosmus, wie du vom Wunderbaren denkst." Now, the text provides no incontrovertible evidence regarding Cosimo's position on the miraculous. Given his worldliness and Poggio's prefatory concession, however, one must assume that he is not sympathetic to it. Here, as in the previous passage, Poggio sets himself apart from his companions and at the same time seeks to make them receptive to his actions and the uncommon events of his story.

In both instances Poggio interrupts his account to address his listeners from the narrative present. Accordingly, his insight into cultural relativity and liberal view of the supernatural characterize him at the moment of narration as well as in the narrated past. Since both attitudes are occasioned or at least reinforced by his experience in the convent, moreover, narrated past and present appear to be directly related. That is, the two passages bridge the gap between past and present and suggest a development of character. Yet, other narrative interpolations contradict this notion. On expressing his excitement over the prospect of discovering the Plautus-codex, Poggio says, "Dass ich darüber den Schlaf verlor, das glaubest du mir, Cosmus, der du meine Begeisterung für die Trümmer einer niedergegangenen grösseren Welt teilst und begünstigst!" And when admiring the "Italianate" artistry of the counterfeit cross, he states, "da ich für den Ruhm meines Vaterlandes begeistert bin, brach ich in die Worte aus: 'Vollendet! Meisterhaft!'" Again speaking from the narrative present, Poggio displays the very solidarity with his friends that the earlier passages appear to vitiate or refute.

While these passages neither confirm nor belie a direct relationship between past and present or a change in Poggio's character, others prove more illuminating. Just before Poggio's narration of the climactic events in the church we read, "'. . . Mein gelehrter und ruhmbedeckter Freund,' unterbrach sich der Erzähler selbst, gegen einen gravitätischen Mann gewendet, welcher . . . sich trotz der Sommerwärme mit dem Faltenwurfe seines Mantels nach Art der Alten drapierte, 'mein grosser Philosoph, sage mir, ich beschwöre dich, was ist das Gewissen?'" Asking rhetorically whether it is universal, he himself responds that it is not and offers the example of Pope John XXII, who in the midst of his evil needs awoke every morning more cheerful than he had gone to sleep the night before.

He then continues, "Nein, das Gewissen ist kein allgemeines und auch unter uns, die wir ein solches besitzen, tritt es, ein Proteus, in wechselnden Formen auf. In meiner Wenigkeit z.B. wird es wach jedes Mal, wo es sich in ein Bild oder in einen Ton verkörpern kann." By way of illustration he recounts a recent experience at the court of a petty tyrant, where during an evening of conviviality on the balcony of a tower he had heard the sigh of a prisoner below. He concludes by saying, "Weg war die Lust und meines Bleibens dort nicht länger. Mein Gewissen war beschwert, das Leben zu gemessen, küssend, trinkend, lachend, neben dem Elende. Gleicherweise konnte ich jetzt das nahe Geschrei einer Verzweifelnden nicht ertragen."

Here, as in numerous other passages, Poggio puts his listeners at arm's length. By posing his question hyperbolically to the philosopher among them, whose mien and attire already relate him to the dottore of comic tradition, he subtly discredits them all and sets himself up as an authority. At the same time, he unintentionally reveals his own limited qualification to judge in matters of conscience. To be sure, he recognizes that conscience is not universal and manifests itself in different ways in different people. He also realizes that in his own case it assumes aesthetic forms. However, he is blind to the corollary that, when unable to take on such forms, it remains dormant in him and delivers him over to the caprice of situational ethics. Even when roused, his illustration indicates, it does not always lead to moral action. While the prisoner's misery weighs heavily on his conscience, he simply leaves the court without attempting to help. This interpolation and its implications clearly explain Poggio's contradictory behavior during his stay in the convent. When he is under the immediate influence of Gertrude and her overwhelming drama of conscience, his own conscience awakens and compels him to act according to its demands. Before and after his encounter with her, however, when life appears to him as unsubstantial form, his conscience remains inert, and he acts with, at best, questionable moral integrity. Connecting past and present in a generalizing manner, moreover, the interpolation demonstrates that Poggio has undergone no basic development of character. With regard to conscience and the aesthetic, the graybeard is essentially the same as the young man.

Another narrative intrusion suggests the fundamental reason for this state of affairs. After expressing his disappointment over the outcome of events in the church, Poggio says, "Eine kurze Weile hatte die Bäuerin vor meinen erregten Sinnen gestanden als die Verkörperung eines höhern Wesens, als ein dämonisches Geschöpf, als die Wahrheit wie sie jubelnd den Schein zerstört. Aber was ist Wahrheit? fragte Pilatus." Poggio proceeds unwittingly from the tacit assumption that truth and art are of the same order of being and, therefore, that an aesthetic mode of experience is capable of capturing truth in personification or other artistic form. However, his disappointment and whole experience in the cloister imply on the contrary that art, while providing an avenue to truth, is not identical to it and cannot make a permanent possession of it or its moral imperative. Poggio's equivocal behavior and basically static character derive not only from his limited access to conscience, but also from the problematic relationship between art and morality itself.

The results of Poggio's endeavor to vindicate himself are as ambiguous as the morality of his conduct. Certainly, he does not steal the codex in the customary sense of the word, but the sophisticated coercion through which he obtains it amounts ultimately to a kind of theft. On the other hand, it is precisely this dubious behavior that leads to his encounter with conscience and frees the moral spirit of art from crass materialism. He breaks his word to the abbess by divulging her artifice to Gertrude, but at the same time liberates the cross and Gertrude from sanctimony and inhumanity. It is not fortuitous that the codex and the cross, linked metaphorically with Gertrude, are both presented as hidden treasures coming to light.

Poggio obviously has no answer to Pilate's question. He neither penetrates absolute truth nor fully comprehends the relative truth of his personal experience. Thus, his view of himself as the instrument of divinity indeed appears hubristic. However, the exposure of the false miracle and Gertrude's fulfillment in family life, like that of Keller's Beatrix, are surely truths pleasing to both God and man. Like the council on a large scale, Poggio restores the integrity of the church in one of its many small corners and enables Gertrude to bear "das eheliche Kreuz" commensurate with her measure of humanity. Despite his shortsightedness, he therefore implements the design implicit in the Verschwörung von Gelegenheiten. For a grand moment, he probes the limits of his own measure of humanity and in fact succeeds in uniting conscience and the aesthetic. If he still finds his Jugendlichkeiten basically innocuous and remains largely insensible to their ramifications, he nonetheless has grown wiser insofar as he is able to articulate a fundamental mode of existence previously experienced naively and in the uncanny law of progression at least dimly recognizes its metaphysical questionability and his own cross. By presenting his tale as a supplement to his Fazetien, he seeks to compensate for the extra vagences of his youth. In a broad but very real sense, his narrative posture is thus justified and he indeed vindicates himself. Perhaps for all these reasons, both positive and negative, his story wins the approval of Cosimo and the other Florentines, with whom he has so much in common after all. He both entertains and edifies them to the degree that they are educable and he is capable.

Meyer's implied narrator is more successful than Poggio in the attainment of his goals. After the opening frame, to be sure, he appears to retreat into total anonymity to return briefly only at the end of the work. In reality, however, he stands in the wings throughout the internal story and not only maintains but increases his initial distance from his material. He allows Poggio to present his tale as a drama which he both performs and recounts and thereby objectifies the events themselves and Poggio's twofold relationship to them. In the process, he provides himself and his reader with a detached and consistent point of view from which to observe the explicit levels of narration. From this vantage he allows the numerous discrepancies within each level and between the two to emerge and permits his reader to assume his own ironic attitude toward the subject matter. Accordingly, he puts the reader in a position to enjoy and learn from his aesthetic experience in a different and far more comprehensive way than Poggio's audience and to know more than Poggio himself.

The narrator's success extends beyond his narrative strategy to his primary attempt to resolve the problem of art and morality. Viewed strictly in terms of his own contribution, certainly, Poggio proves to be less than a totally reliable ally. Yet, to concentrate on his shortcomings would be to disregard the spirit and structure of the work. While the decisive scene in the church remains an episode in his life, it furnishes the dramatic climax and formal apex of the work, without which the entire edifice would collapse. Despite all qualifications, it is the narrator's affirmation, through Poggio, of art as a means of experiencing the actualizing conscience that determines the dominant tone and structural center of the work.

Moreover, the narrator's success is not dependent on Poggio's. Indeed, he presents Poggio's aestheticism as but one of many forms in which conscience may appear and contrasts it with two others which reveal strengths as well as weaknesses. Brigittchen's religiosity is materialistic to a fault but retains a degree of justification in its hard-nosed pragmatism, necessary for the survival of the Church as an institution. Gertrude's faith is adamantly personal, yet remains exceedingly admirable in its unshakable integrity. Thereby, the narrator suggests that a certain relativity obtains among the three—and, by extension, all—expressions of conscience, both in the abstract and as historical phenomena. The morality of the major characters, as representatives of these expressions and the cultural currents of the fifteenth century, is contingent in part on their frame of reference, and what is moral within one may be immoral within another. More important than the antitheses themselves is the "Zusammenschau der Gegensätze." This is not to say that the narrator makes no distinctions. He obviously has little sympathy for the abbess. And in the contrast between Poggio's decadent issue and Gertrude's fruitful marriage he intimates both a personal and supranatural judgment. However, Poggio's leading role in a drama both poetic and implicitly trascendent testifies amply to his significance within the system of values established in the work. The narrator's criticism does not penetrate to the core of Poggio's existence, but touches only its extremes. Precisely by demonstrating the impotence as well as the power of art through an artistic medium, Meyer and his narrator achieve a union of conscience and the aesthetic, a union less pretentious than Poggio's, but enduring due to its foundation in the author's perception of the nature of things.

In its nuanced interweaving of motif, structure, and narrative perspective Plautus im Nonnenkloster is indeed a formal tour de force. And in its treatment of the problematic relationship between art and morality it can lay claim to thematic consequence. Yet, recognition of this theme should not beguile one into misprizing the very force that gave it expression. The Florentines' celebration of the greatness of the century at the end of the work is tinged with irony, to be sure. However, the satyr embracing the chalice, symbols of Poggio and Gertrude and of art and conscience, laughs perhaps less at those who overestimate the value of art than at those who underestimate it.