No cruel guard of diligent cares, that keep Crown'd woes awake, as things too wise for sleep: But reverent discipline and religious fear, And soft obedience, find sweet biding here; Silence and sacred rest; peace and pure joys; Kind loves keep house, lie close and make no noise.
Here behind the walls of the convent "a common grayness silvered everything" and all care was remote, save that, never to be escaped by womankind, of making two ends meet.
Nevertheless the danger was there. Only a minority, one may be sure, revolted actively against the duties which are sometimes, most significantly, called "the burthen of religion"[913]. That minority is known to us, for the sinner and the apostate, whether inspired by lust or by levity, mere victims to their own weakness, or active rebels against an intolerable dulness, have left their mark in official documents. But the number can only be guessed at of those others, who carried in their hearts for all their staid lives the complaint of the Latin song:
Sono tintinnabulum Repeto psalterium, Gratum linquo somnium Cum dormire cuperem, Heu misella! Nichil est deterius tali vita Cum enim sim petulans et lasciva[914].
The bell I am ringing, The psalter am singing, And from my bed creeping Who fain would be sleeping, Misery me! O what can be worse than this life that I dree, When naughty and lovelorn and wanton I be?
"Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room" is a charming justification of the sonnet, but it is neither good psychology nor good history.
It can never be too often repeated that many monks and nuns entered religion as a career while still children, with no particular vocation for the religious life. To such, even though they might experience no longing for the forbidden pleasures of the world, the monotony of the cloister would often be hard to bear. Their young limbs would kick against its restrictions and the changing moods of adolescence would turn and twist in vain within the iron bars of its unadaptable routine. Even to those no longer young happiness would depend at the best upon the fostering of a quick spiritual life, at the worst upon lack of imagination and of vitality. The undaunted daughter of desires, the man in whom religion burned as a strong fire, could find happiness in the life. But lesser brethren could not. Ennui, more deadly even than sensual temptation, was the devil who tormented them. So in the convents of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a sympathetic eye and an understanding mind will diagnose the fundamental disease as reaction against routine by men and women in whom Nature, expelled by a pitchfork, had returned a thousand times more strong.