[Footnote 103: Of course there is plenty of alliteration in "Alison." That ornament is too grateful to the English ear ever to have ceased or to be likely to cease out of English poetry. But it has ceased to possess any metrical value; it has absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the line.]

[Sidenote: The gain of form.]

Yet another conclusion may perhaps be risked, and that is that this change of prosody was either directly caused by, or in singular coincidence was associated with, a great enlargement of the range and no slight improvement of the quality of poetry. Anglo-Saxon verse at its best has grandeur, mystery, force, a certain kind of pathos. But it is almost entirely devoid of sweetness, of all the lighter artistic attractions, of power to represent other than religious passion, of adaptability to the varied uses of lyric. All these additional gifts, and in no slight measure, have now been given; and there is surely an almost fanatical hatred of form in the refusal to connect the gain with those changes, in vocabulary first, in prosody secondly, which have been noted. For there is not only the fact, but there is a more than plausible reason for the fact. The alliterative accentual verse of indefinite length is obviously unsuited for all the lighter, and for some of the more serious, purposes of verse. Unless it is at really heroic height (and at this height not even Shakespeare can keep poetry invariably) it must necessarily be flat, awkward, prosaic, heavy, all which qualities are the worst foes of the Muses. The new equipments may not have been indispensable to the poet's soaring—they may not be the greater wings of his song, the mighty pinions that take him beyond Space and Time into Eternity and the Infinite. But they are most admirable talaria, ankle-winglets enabling him to skim and scud, to direct his flight this way and that, to hover as well as to tower, even to run at need as well as to fly.

That a danger was at hand, the danger of too great restriction in the syllabic direction, has been admitted. The greatest poet of the fourteenth century in England—the greatest, for the matter of that, from the beginning till the sixteenth—went some way in this path, and if Chaucer's English followers had been men of genius we might have been sorely trammelled. Fortunately Lydgate and Occleve and Hawes showed the dangers rather than the attractions of strictness, and the contemporary practice of alliterative irregulars kept alive the appetite for liberty. But at this time—at our time—it was restriction, regulation, quantification, metrical arrangement, that English needed; and it received them.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The "accent" theory.]

These remarks are of course not presented as a complete account, even in summary, of English, much less of European prosody. They are barely more than the heads of such a summary, or than indications of the line which the inquiry might, and in the author's view should, take. Perhaps they may be worked out—or rather the working out of them may be published—more fully hereafter. But for the present they may possibly be useful as a protest against the "accent" and "stress" theories which have been so common of late years in regard to English poetry, and which, though not capable of being applied in quite the same fashion to the Romance languages, have had their counterparts in attempts to decry the application of classical prosody (which has never been very well understood on the Continent) to modern tongues. No one can speak otherwise than respectfully of Dr Guest, whose book is certainly one of the most patient and ingenious studies of the kind to be found in any literature, and whose erudition, at a time when such erudition needed far greater efforts than now, cannot be too highly praised. But it is a besetting sin or disease of Englishmen in all matters, after pooh-poohing innovation, to go blindly in for it; and I cannot but think that Dr Guest's accentual theory, after being for years mainly neglected, has, for years again, been altogether too greedily swallowed. It is not of course a case necessarily of want of scholarship, or want of ear, for there are few better scholars or poets than Mr Robert Bridges, who, though not a mere Guestite, holds theories of prosody which seem to me even less defensible than Guest's. But it is, I think, a case of rather misguided patriotism, which thinks it necessary to invent an English prosody for English poems.

[Sidenote: Initial fallacies.]

This is surely a mistake. Allowances in degree, in shade, in local colour, there must of course be in prosody as in other things. The developments, typical and special, of English prosody in the nineteenth century cannot be quite the same as those of Greek two thousand years ago, or of French to-day. But if, as I see not the slightest reason for doubting, prosody is not an artificially acquired art but a natural result of the natural desires, the universal organs of humanity, it is excessively improbable that the prosodic results of nations so nearly allied to each other, and so constantly studying each other's work, as Greeks, Romans, and modern Europeans, should be in any great degree different. If quantity, if syllabic equivalence and so forth, do not display themselves in Anglo-Saxon or in Icelandic, it must be remembered that the poetry of these nations was after all comparatively small, rather isolated, and in the conditions of extremely early development—a childish thing to which there is not the slightest rhyme or reason for straining ourselves to assimilate the things of manhood. That accent modified English prosody nobody need deny; there is no doubt that the very great freedom of equivalence—which makes it, for instance, at least theoretically possible to compose an English heroic line of five tribrachs—and the immense predominance of common syllables in the language, are due in some degree to a continuance of accentual influence.

[Sidenote: And final perversities thereof.]

But to go on from this, as Dr Guest and some of his followers have done, to the subjection of the whole invaluable vocabulary of classical prosody to a sort of praemunire, to hold up the hands in horror at the very name of a tribrach, and exhibit symptoms of catalepsy at the word catalectic—to ransack the dictionary for unnatural words or uses of words like "catch," and "stop," and "pause," where a perfectly clear and perfectly flexible terminology is ready to your hand—this does seem to me in another sense a very childish thing indeed, and one that cannot be too soon put away. It is no exaggeration to say that the extravagances, the unnatural contortions of scansion, the imputations of irregularity and impropriety on the very greatest poets with which Dr Guest's book swarms, must force themselves on any one who studies that book thoroughly and impartially. When theory leads to the magisterial indorsement of "gross fault" on some of the finest passages of Shakespeare and Milton, because they "violate" Dr Guest's privy law of "the final pause"; when we are told that "section 9," as Dr Guest is pleased to call that admirable form of "sixes," the anapaest followed by two iambs,[104] one of the great sources of music in the ballad metre, is "a verse which has very little to recommend it"; when one of Shakespeare's secrets, the majestic full stop before the last word of the line, is black-marked as "opposed to every principle of accentual rhythm," then the thing becomes not so much outrageous as absurd. Prosody respectfully and intelligently attempting to explain how the poets produce their best things is useful and agreeable: when it makes an arbitrary theory beforehand, and dismisses the best things as bad because they do not agree therewith, it becomes a futile nuisance. And I believe that there is no period of our literature which, when studied, will do more to prevent or correct such fatuity than this very period of Early Middle English.

[Footnote 104: His instance is Burns's—

"Like a rogue for for gerie."

It is a pity he did not reinforce it with many of the finest lines in The Ancient Mariner.]



CHAPTER VI.

MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN POETRY.

POSITION OF GERMANY. MERIT OF ITS POETRY. FOLK-EPICS: THE 'NIBELUNGENLIED.' THE 'VOLSUNGA SAGA.' THE GERMAN VERSION. METRES. RHYME AND LANGUAGE. 'KUDRUN.' SHORTER NATIONAL EPICS. LITERARY POETRY. ITS FOUR CHIEF MASTERS. EXCELLENCE, BOTH NATURAL AND ACQUIRED, OF GERMAN VERSE. ORIGINALITY OF ITS ADAPTATION. THE PIONEERS: HEINRICH VON VELDEKE. GOTTFRIED OF STRASBURG. HARTMANN VON AUE. 'EREC DER WANDERAERE' AND 'IWEIN.' LYRICS. THE "BOOKLETS." 'DER ARME HEINRICH.' WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH. 'TITUREL.' 'WILLEHALM.' 'PARZIVAL.' WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE. PERSONALITY OF THE POETS. THE MINNESINGERS GENERALLY.

[Sidenote: Position of Germany.]

It must have been already noticed that one main reason for the unsurpassed literary interest of this present period is that almost all the principal European nations contribute, in their different ways, elements to that interest. The contribution is not in all cases one of positive literary production, of so much matter of the first value actually added to the world's library. But in some cases it is; and in the instance to which we come at present it is so in a measure approached by no other country except France and perhaps Iceland. Nor is Germany,[105] as every other country except Iceland may be said to be, wholly a debtor or vassal to France herself. Partly she is so; of the three chief divisions of Middle High German poetry (for prose here practically does not count), the folk-epic, the "art-epic," as the Germans themselves not very happily call it, and the lyric—the second is always, and the third to no small extent, what might punningly be called in copyhold of France. But even the borrowed material is treated with such intense individuality of spirit that it almost acquires independence; and part of the matter, as has been said, is not borrowed at all.

[Footnote 105: The most accessible History of German Literature is that of Scherer (English translation, 2 vols., Oxford, 1886), a book of fair information and with an excellent bibliography, but not very well arranged, and too full of extra-literary matter. Carlyle's great Nibelungenlied Essay (Essays, vol. iii.) can never be obsolete save in unimportant matters; that which follows on Early German Literature is good, but less good. Mr Gosse's Northern Studies (1879) contains a very agreeable paper on Walther von der Vogelweide. The Wagnerites have naturally of late years dealt much with Wolfram von Eschenbach, but seldom from a literary point of view.]

[Sidenote: Merit of its poetry.]

It has been pointed out that for some curious reason French literary critics, not usually remarkable for lack of national vanity, have been by no means excessive in their laudations of the earlier literature of their country. The opposite is the case with those of Germany, and the rather extravagant patriotism of some of their expressions may perhaps have had a bad effect on some foreign readers. It cannot, for instance, be otherwise than disgusting to even rudimentary critical feeling to be told in the same breath that the first period of German literature was "richer in inventive genius than any that followed it," and that "nothing but fragments of a single song[106] remain to us" from this first period—fragments, it may be added, which, though interesting enough, can, in no possible judgment that can be called judgment, rank as in any way first-rate poetry. So, too, the habit of comparing the Nibelungenlied to the Iliad and Kudrun to the Odyssey (parallels not far removed from the Thucydides-and-Tennyson order) may excite resentment. But the Middle High German verse of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is in itself of such interest, such variety, such charm, that if only it be approached in itself, and not through the medium of its too officious ushers, its effect on any real taste for poetry is undoubted.

[Footnote 106: Hildebrand and Hadubrand.]

The three divisions above sketched may very well be taken in the order given. The great folk-epics just mentioned, with some smaller poems, such as Koenig Rother, are almost invariably anonymous; the translators or adaptors from the French—Gottfried von Strasburg, Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and others—are at least known by name, if we do not know much else about them; and this is also the case with the Lyric poets, especially the best of them, the exquisite singer known as Walter of the Bird-Meadow.

[Sidenote: Folk-epics—The Nibelungenlied.]

[Sidenote: The Volsunga Saga.]

It was inevitable that the whole literary energy of a nation which is commentatorial or nothing, should be flung on such a subject as the Nibelungenlied;[107] the amount of work expended on the subject by Germans during the century in which the poem has been known is enormous, and might cause despair, if happily it were not for the most part negligible. The poem served as a principal ground in the battle—not yet at an end, but now in a more or less languid condition—between the believers in conglomerate epic, the upholders of the theory that long early poems are always a congeries of still earlier ballads or shorter chants, and the advocates of their integral condition. The authorship of the poem, its date, and its relation to previous work or tradition, with all possible excursions and alarums as to sun-myths and so forth, have been discussed ad nauseam. Literary history, as here understood, need not concern itself much about such things. It is sufficient to say that the authorship of the Lied in its present condition is quite unknown; that its date would appear to be about the centre of our period, or, in other words, not earlier than the middle of the twelfth century or later than the middle of the thirteenth, and that, as far as the subject goes, we undoubtedly have handlings of it in Icelandic (the so-called Volsunga Saga), and still earlier verse-dealings in the Elder Edda, which are older, and probably much older, than the German poem.[108] They are not only older, but they are different. As a Volsung story, the interest is centred on the ancestor of Sigurd (Sigfried in the later poem), on his acquisition of the hoard of the dwarf Andvari by slaying the dragon Fafnir, its guardian, and on the tale of his love for the Amazon Brynhild; how by witchcraft he is beguiled to wed instead Gudrun the daughter of Giuki, while Gunnar, Gudrun's brother, marries Brynhild by the assistance of Sigurd himself; how the sisters-in-law quarrel, with the result that Gudrun's brothers slay Sigurd, on whose funeral-pyre Brynhild (having never ceased to love him and wounded herself mortally), is by her own will burnt; and how Gudrun, having married King Atli, Brynhild's brother, achieves vengeance on her own brethren by his means. A sort of coda of the story tells of the third marriage of Gudrun to King Jonakr, of the cruel fate of Swanhild, her daughter by Sigurd (who was so fair that when she gazed on the wild horses that were to tread her to death they would not harm her, and her head had to be covered ere they would do their work), of the further fate of Swanhild's half-brothers in their effort to avenge her, and of the final threnos and death of Gudrun herself.

[Footnote 107: Ed. Bartsch. 6th ed. Leipzig, 1886.]

[Footnote 108: For the verse originals see Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Boreale (Oxford, 1883), vol. i. The verse and prose alike will be found conveniently translated in a cheap little volume of the "Camelot Library," The Volsunga Saga, by W. Morris and E. Magnusson (London, 1888).]

The author of the Nibelungenlied (or rather the "Nibelungen-Noth," for this is the older title of the poem, which has a very inferior sequel called Die Klage) has dealt with the story very differently. He pays no attention to the ancestry of Sifrit (Sigurd), and little to his acquisition of the hoard, diminishes the part of Brynhild, stripping it of all romantic interest as regards Sifrit, and very largely increases the importance of the revenge of Gudrun, now called Kriemhild. Only sixteen of the thirty-nine "aventiuren" or "fyttes" (into which the poem in the edition here used is divided) are allotted to the part up to and including the murder of Sifrit; the remaining twenty-three deal with the vengeance of Kriemhild, who is herself slain just when this vengeance is complete, the after-piece of her third marriage and the fate of Swanhild being thus rendered impossible.

Among the idler parts of Nibelungen discussions perhaps the idlest are the attempts made by partisans of Icelandic and German literature respectively to exalt or depress these two handlings, each in comparison with the other. There is no real question of superiority or inferiority, but only one of difference. The older handling, in the Volsunga Saga to some extent, but still more in the Eddaic songs, has perhaps the finer touches of pure clear poetry in single passages and phrases; the story of Sigurd and Brynhild has a passion which is not found in the German version; the defeat of Fafnir and the treacherous Regin is excellent; and the wild and ferocious story of Sinfioetli, with which the saga opens, has unmatched intensity, well brought out in Mr Morris's splendid verse-rendering, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung.[109]

[Footnote 109: 4th edition. London, 1887.]

[Sidenote: The German version.]

But every poet has a perfect right to deal with any story as he chooses, if he makes good poetry of it; and the poet of the Nibelungenlied is more than justified in this respect. By curtailing the beginning, cutting off the coda above mentioned altogether, and lessening the part and interest of Brynhild, he has lifted Kriemhild to a higher, a more thoroughly expounded, and a more poetical position, and has made her one of the greatest heroines of epic, if not the greatest in all literature. The Gudrun of the Norse story is found supplying the loss of one husband with the gain of another to an extent perfectly consonant with Icelandic ideas, but according to less insular standards distinctly damaging to her interest as a heroine; and in revenging her brothers on Atli, after revenging Sigurd on her brothers by means of Atli, she completely alienates all sympathy except on a ferocious and pedantic theory of blood-revenge. The Kriemhild of the German is quite free from this drawback; and her own death comes just when and as it should—not so much a punishment for the undue bloodthirstiness of her revenge as an artistic close to the situation. There may be too many episodic personages—Dietrich of Bern, for instance, has extremely little to do in this galley. But the strength, thoroughness, and in its own savage way charm of Kriemhild's character, and the incomparable series of battles between the Burgundian princes and Etzel's men in the later cantos—cantos which contain the very best poetical fighting in the history of the world—far more than redeem this. The Nibelungenlied is a very great poem; and with Beowulf (the oldest, but the least interesting on the whole), Roland (the most artistically finished in form), and the Poem of the Cid (the cheerfullest and perhaps the fullest of character), composes a quartette of epic with which the literary story of the great European literary nations most appropriately begins. In bulk, dramatic completeness, and a certain furia, the Nibelungenlied, though the youngest and probably the least original, is the greatest of the four.

[Sidenote: Metres.]

The form, though not finished with the perfection of the French decasyllabic, is by no means of a very uncouth description. The poem is written in quatrains, rhymed couplet and couplet, not alternately, but evidently intended for quatrains, inasmuch as the sense frequently runs on at the second line, but regularly stops at the fourth. The normal line of which these quatrains are composed is a thirteen-syllabled one divided by a central pause, so that the first half is an iambic dimeter catalectic, and the second an iambic dimeter hypercatalectic.

"Von einer isenstangen: des gie dem helde not."

The first half sometimes varies from this norm, though not very often, the alteration usually taking the form of the loss of the first syllable, so that the half-line consists of three trochees. The second half is much more variable. Sometimes, in the same way as with the first, a syllable is dropped at the opening, and the half-line becomes similarly trochaic. Sometimes there is a double rhyme instead of a single, making seven syllables, though not altering the rhythm; and sometimes this is extended to a full octosyllable. But this variety by no means results in cacophony or confusion; the general swing of the metre is well maintained, and maintains itself in turn on the ear.

[Sidenote: Rhyme and language.]

In the rhymes, as in those of all early rhymed poems, there is a certain monotony. Just as in the probably contemporary Layamon the poet is tempted into rhyme chiefly by such easy opportunities as "other" and "brother," "king" and "thing," so here, though rhyme is the rule, and not, as there, the exception, certain pairs, especially "wip" and "lip" ("wife" and "body"), "sach" and "sprach," "geben" and "geleben," "tot" and "not," recur perhaps a little too often for the ear's perfect comfort. But this is natural and extremely pardonable. The language is exceedingly clear and easy—far nearer to German of the present day than Layamon's own verse, or the prose of the Ancren Riwle, is to English prose and verse of the nineteenth century; the differences being, as a rule, rather matters of spelling or phrase than of actual vocabulary. It is very well suited both to the poet's needs and to the subject; there being little or nothing of that stammer—as it may be called—which is not uncommon in mediaeval work, as if the writer were trying to find words that he cannot find for a thought which he cannot fully shape even to himself. In short, there is in the particular kind, stage, and degree that accomplishment which distinguishes the greater from the lesser achievements of literature.

[Sidenote: Kudrun.]

Kudrun[110] or Gudrun—it is a little curious that this should be the name of the original joint-heroine of the Nibelungenlied, of the heroine of one of the finest and most varied of the Icelandic sagas, the Laxdaela, and of the present poem—is far less known to general students of literature than its companion. Nor can it be said that this comparative neglect is wholly undeserved. It is an interesting poem enough; but neither in story nor in character-interest, in arrangement nor in execution, can it vie with the Nibelungen, of which in formal points it has been thought to be a direct imitation. The stanza is much the same, except that there is a much more general tendency to arrange the first couplet in single masculine rhyme and the second in feminine, while the second half of the fourth line is curiously prolonged to either ten or eleven syllables. The first refinement may be an improvement: the second certainly is not, and makes it very difficult to a modern ear to get a satisfactory swing on the verse. The language, moreover (though this is a point on which I speak with some diffidence), has a slightly more archaic cast, as of intended archaism, than is the case with the Nibelungen.

[Footnote 110: Ed. Bartsch. 4th ed. Leipzig, 1880.]

As for matter, the poem has the interest, always considerable to English readers, of dealing with the sea, and the shores of the sea; and, like the Nibelungenlied, it seems to have had older forms, of which some remains exist in the Norse. But there is less coincidence of story: and the most striking incident in the Norse—an unending battle, where the combatants, killed every night, come alive again every day—is in the German a merely ordinary "battle of Wulpensand," where one side has the worst, and cloisters are founded for the repose of the dead. On the other hand, Kudrun, while rationalised in some respects and Christianised in others, has the extravagance, not so much primitive as carelessly artificial, of the later romances. Romance has a special charter to neglect chronology; but the chronology here is exceptionally wanton. After the above-mentioned Battle of Wulpensand, the beaten side resigns itself quite comfortably to wait till the sons of the slain grow up: and to suit this arrangement the heroine remains in ill-treated captivity—washing clothes by the sea-shore—for fifteen years or so. And even thus the climax is not reached; for Gudrun's companion in this unpleasant task, and apparently (since they are married at the same time) her equal, or nearly so, in age, has in the exordium of the poem also been the companion of Gudrun's grandmother in durance to some griffins, from whom they were rescued by Gudrun's grandfather.

One does not make peddling criticisms of this kind on any legend that has the true poetic character of power—of sweeping the reader along with it; but this I, at least, can hardly find in Kudrun. It consists of three or perhaps four parts: the initial adventures of Child Hagen of Ireland with the griffins who carry him off; the wooing of his daughter Hilde by King Hetel, whose ambassadors, Wate, Morunc, and Horant, play a great part throughout the poem; the subsequent wooing of her daughter Gudrun, and her imprisonment and ill-usage by Gerlind, her wooer's mother; her rescue by her lover Herwig after many years, and the slaughter of her tyrants, especially Gerlind, which "Wate der alte" makes. There is also a generally happy ending, which, rather contrary to the somewhat ferocious use and wont of these poems, is made to include Hartmuth, Gudrun's unsuccessful wooer, and his sister Ortrun. The most noteworthy character, perhaps, is the above-mentioned Wate (or Wade), who is something like Hagen in the Nibelungenlied as far as valour and ferocity go, but is more of a subordinate. Gudrun herself has good touches—especially where in her joy at the appearance of her rescuers she flings the hated "wash" into the sea, and in one or two other passages. But she is nothing like such a person as Brynhild in the Volsung story or Kriemhild in the Nibelungenlied. Even the "wash" incident and the state which, in the teeth of her enemies, she takes upon her afterwards—the finest thing in the poem, though it frightens some German critics who see beauties elsewhere that are not very clear to eyes not native—fail to give her this personality. A better touch of nature still, though a slight one, is her lover Herwig's fear, when he meets with a slight mishap before the castle of her prison, that she may see it and reproach him with it after they are married. But on the whole, Kudrun, though an excellent story of adventure, is not a great poem in the sense in which the Nibelungenlied is one.

[Sidenote: Shorter national epics.]

Besides these two long poems (the greater of which, the Nibelungenlied, connects itself indirectly with others through the personage of Dietrich[111]) there is a group of shorter and rather older pieces, attributed in their present forms to the twelfth century, and not much later than the German translation of the Chanson de Roland by a priest named Conrad, which is sometimes put as early as 1130, and the German translation (see chapter iv.) of the Alixandre by Lamprecht, which may be even older. Among these smaller epics, poems on the favourite mediaeval subjects of Solomon and Marcolf, St Brandan, &c., are often classed, but somewhat wrongly, as they belong to a different school. Properly of the group are Koenig Rother, Herzog Ernst, and Orendel. All these suggest distinct imitation of the chansons, Orendel inclining rather to the legendary and travelling kind of Jourdains de Blaivies or Huon, Herzog Ernst to the more feudal variety. Koenig Rother,[112] the most important of the batch, is a poem of a little more than five thousand lines, of rather irregular length and rhythm, but mostly very short, rhymed, but with a leaning towards assonance. The strong connection of these poems with the chansons is also shown by the fact that Rother is made grandfather of Charlemagne and King of Rome. Whether he had anything to do with the actual Lombard King Rother of the seventh century is only a speculative question; the poem itself seems to be Bavarian, and to date from about 1150. The story is one of wooing under considerable difficulties, and thus in some respects at least nearer to a roman d'aventures than a chanson.

[Footnote 111: The very name of this remarkable personage seems to have exercised a fascination over the early German mind, and appears as given to others (Wolfdietrich, Hugdietrich) who have nothing to do with him of Verona.]

[Footnote 112: Ed. Von Bahder. Halle, 1884.]

[Sidenote: Literary poetry.]

It will depend on individual taste whether the reader prefers the so-called "art-poetry" which broke out in Germany, almost wholly on a French impulse, but with astonishing individuality and colour of national and personal character, towards the end of the twelfth century, to the folk-poetry, of which the greater examples have been mentioned hitherto, whether he reverses the preference, or whether, in the mood of the literary student proper, he declines to regard either with preference, but admires and delights in both.[113] On either side there are compensations for whatever loss may be urged by the partisans of the other. It may or may not be an accident that the sons of adoption are more numerous than the sons of the house: it is not so certain that the one group is to be on any true reckoning preferred to the other.

[Footnote 113: The subjects of the last paragraph form, it will be seen, a link between the two, being at least probably based on German traditions, but influenced in form by French.]

[Sidenote: Its four chief masters.]

In any case the German literary poetry (a much better phrase than kunst-poesie, for there is plenty of art on both sides) forms a part, and, next to its French originals, perhaps the greatest part, of that extraordinary and almost unparalleled blossoming of literature which, starting from France, overspread the whole of Europe at one time, the last half or quarter of the twelfth century, and the first quarter of the thirteenth. Four names, great and all but of the greatest—Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried of Strasburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide—illustrate it as far as Germany is concerned. Another, somewhat earlier than these, and in a way their master, Eilhart von Oberge, is supposed or rather known to have dealt with the Tristram story before Gottfried; and Heinrich von Veldeke, in handling the AEneid, communicated to Germany something of a directly classical, though more of a French, touch. We have spoken of the still earlier work of Conrad and Lamprecht, while in passing must be mentioned other things fashioned after French patterns, such as the Kaiserchronik, which is attributed to Bavarian hands. The period of flourishing of the literary poetry proper was not long—1150 to 1350 would cover very nearly the whole of it, and, here, as elsewhere, it is impossible to deal with every individual, or even with the majority of individuals. But some remarks in detail, though not in great detail, on the four principals above referred to, will put the German literary "state" of the time almost as well as if all the battalions and squadrons were enumerated. Hartmann, Gottfried, and Wolfram, even in what we have of them, lyric writers in part, were chiefly writers of epic or romance; Walther is a song-writer pure and simple.

[Sidenote: Excellence, both natural and acquired, of German verse.]

One thing may be said with great certainty of the division of literature to which we have come, that none shows more clearly the natural aptitude of the people who produced it for poetry. It is a familiar observation from beginners in German who have any literary taste, that German poetry reads naturally, German prose does not. In verse the German disencumbers himself of that gruesome clumsiness which almost always besets him in the art he learnt so late, and never learnt to any perfection. To "say" is a trouble to him, a trouble too often unconquerable; to sing is easy enough. And this truth, true of all centuries of German literature, is never truer than here. Translated or adapted verse is not usually the most cheerful department of poetry. The English romances, translated or adapted from the French, at times on the whole later than these, have been unduly abused; but they are certainly not the portion of the literature of his country on which an Englishman would most pride himself. Even the home-grown and, as I would fain believe, home-made legend of Arthur, had to wait till the fifteenth century before it met, and then in prose, a worthy master in English.

[Sidenote: Originality of its adaptation.]

But the German adapters of French at the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are persons of very different calibre from the translators of Alexander and the other English-French romances, even from those who with far more native talent Englished Havelok and Horn. If I have spoken harshly of German admiration of Kudrun, I am glad to make this amends and to admit that Gottfried's Tristan is by far the best of all the numerous rehandlings of the story which have come down to us. If we must rest Hartmann von Aue's chief claims on the two Buechlein, on the songs, and on the delightful Armer Heinrich, yet his Iwein and his Erec can hold their own even with two of the freshest and most varied of Chrestien's original poems. No one except the merest pedant of originality would hesitate to put Parzival above Percevale le Gallois, though Wolfram von Eschenbach may be thought to have been less fortunate with Willehalm. And though in the lyric, the debt due to both troubadour and trouvere is unmistakable, it is equally unmistakable what mighty usury the minnesingers have paid for the capital they borrowed. The skill both of Northern and Southern Frenchmen is seldom to seek in lyric: we cannot give them too high praise as fashioners of instruments for other men to use. The cheerful bird-voice of the trouvere, the half artificial but not wholly insincere intensity of his brethren of the langue d'oc, will never miss their meed. But for real "cry," for the diviner elements of lyric, we somehow wait till we hear it in

"Under der linden An der heide, da unser zweier bette was, da muget ir vinden schone beide gebrochen bluomen unde gras. Vor dem walde in einem tal, tandaradei! schone sanc diu nahtegal."[114]

[Footnote 114: Walther's ninth Lied, opening stanza.]

At last we are free from the tyranny of the iambic, and have variety beyond the comparative freedom of the trochee. The blessed liberty of trisyllabic feet not merely comes like music, but is for the first time complete music, to the ear.

[Sidenote: The pioneers. Heinrich von Veldeke.]

Historians arrange the process of borrowing from the French and adjusting prosody to the loans in, roughly speaking, three stages. The first of these is represented by Lamprecht's Alexander and Conrad's Roland; while the second and far more important has for chief exponents an anonymous rendering of the universally popular Flore et Blanchefleur,[115] the capital example of a pure love-story in which love triumphs over luck and fate, and differences of nation and religion. Of this only fragments survive, and the before-mentioned first German version of the Tristan story by Eilhart von Oberge exists only in a much altered form of the fifteenth century. But both, as well as the work in lyric and narrative of Heinrich von Veldeke, date well within the twelfth century, and the earliest of them may not be much younger than its middle. It was Heinrich who seems to have been the chief master in form of the greater poets mentioned above, and now to be noticed as far as it is possible to us. We do not know, personally speaking, very much about them, though the endless industry of their commentators, availing itself of not a little sheer guesswork, has succeeded in spinning various stories concerning them; and the curious incident of the Wartburg-krieg or minstrels' tournament, though reported much later, very likely has sound traditional foundations. But it is not very necessary to believe, for instance, that Gottfried von Strasburg makes an attack on Wolfram von Eschenbach. And generally the best attitude is that of an editor of the said Gottfried (who himself rather fails to reck his own salutary rede by proceeding to redistribute the ordinary attribution of poems), "Ich bekenne dass ich in diesen Dingen skeptischer Natur bin."

[Footnote 115: Found in every language, but originally French.]

[Sidenote: Gottfried of Strasburg.]

If, however, even Gottfried's own authorship of the Tristan[116] is rather a matter of extremely probable inference than of certain knowledge, and if the lives of most of the poets are very little known, the poems themselves are fortunately there, for every one who chooses to read and to form his own opinion about them. The palm for work of magnitude in every sense belongs to Gottfried's Tristan and to Wolfram's Parzival, and as it happens—as it so often happens—the contrasts of these two works are of the most striking and interesting character. The Tristram story, as has been said above, despite its extreme popularity and the abiding hold which it has exercised on poets as well as readers, is on the whole of a lower and coarser kind than the great central Arthurian legend. The philtre, though it supplies a certain excuse for the lovers, degrades the purely romantic character of their affection in more than compensating measure; the conduct of Iseult to the faithful Brengwain, if by no means unfeminine, is exceedingly detestable; and if Tristram was nearly as good a knight as Lancelot, he certainly was not nearly so good a lover or nearly so thorough a gentleman. But the attractions of the story were and are all the greater, we need not say to the vulgar, but to the general; and Gottfried seems to have been quite admirably and almost ideally qualified to treat them. His French original is not known, for the earlier French versions of this story have perished or only survive in fragments; and there is an almost inextricable coil about the "Thomas" to whom Gottfried refers, and who used to be (though this has now been given up) identified with no less a person than Thomas the Rhymer, Thomas of Erceldoune himself. But we can see, as clearly as if we had parallel texts, that Gottfried treated his original as all real and sensible poets do treat their originals—that is to say, that he took what he wanted, added what he chose, and discarded what he pleased. In his handling of the French octosyllable he at once displays that impatience of the rigidly syllabic system of prosody which Teutonic poetry of the best kind always shows sooner or later. At first the octosyllables are arranged in a curious and not particularly charming scheme of quatrains, not only mono-rhymed, but so arranged that the very same words occur in alternate places, or in 1, 4, and 2, 3—"Man," "kan," "man," "kan"; "list," "ist," "ist," "list,"—the latter order being in this interesting, that it suggests the very first appearance of the In Memoriam stanza. But Gottfried was much too sensible a poet to think of writing a long poem—his, which is not complete, and was continued by Ulrich von Turheim, by an Anon, and by Heinrich von Freiberg, extends to some twenty thousand lines—in such a measure as this. He soon takes up the simple octosyllabic couplet, treated, however, with great freedom. The rhymes are sometimes single, sometimes double, occasionally even triple. The syllables constantly sink to seven, and sometimes even to six, or extend themselves, by the admission of trisyllabic feet, to ten, eleven, if not even twelve. Thus, once more, the famous "Christabel" metre is here, not indeed in the extremely mobile completeness which Coleridge gave it, nor even with quite such an indulgence in anapaests as Spenser allows himself in "The Oak and the Brere," but to all intents and purposes fully constituted, if not fully developed.

[Footnote 116: Ed. Bechstein. 3d ed., 2 vols. Leipzig, 1891.]

And Gottfried is quite equal to his form. One may feel, indeed, and it is not unpleasant to feel, that evidence of the "young hand," which consists in digressions from the text, of excursus and ambages, essays, as it were, to show, "Here I am speaking quite for myself, and not merely reading off book." But he tells the story very well—compare, for instance, the crucial point of the substitution of Brengwain for Iseult in him and in the English Sir Tristrem, or the charming account of the "Minnegrotte" in the twenty-seventh song, with the many other things of the kind in French, English, and German of the time. Also he has constant little bursts, little spurts, of half-lyrical cry, which lighten the narrative charmingly.

"Diu wise Isot, diu schoene Isot, Diu liuhtet alse der morgenrot,"

is the very thing the want of which mars the pleasantly flowing but somewhat featureless octosyllables of his French models. In the famous passage[117] where he has been thought to reflect on Wolfram, he certainly praises other poets without stint, and shows himself a generous as well as a judicious critic. How Hartmann von Aue hits the meaning of a story! how loud and clear rings the crystal of his words! Did not Heinrich von Veldeke "imp the first shoot on Teutish tongues" (graft French on German poetry)? With what a lofty voice does the nightingale of the Bird-Meadow (Walther) warble across the heath! Nor is it unpleasant to come shortly afterwards to our old friends Apollo and the Camoenae, the nine "Sirens of the ears"—a slightly mixed reminiscence, but characteristic of the union of classical and romantic material which communicates to the Middle Ages so much of their charm. Indeed nowhere in this Pisgah sight of literature would it be pleasanter to come down and expatiate on the particular subject than in the case of these Middle High German poets.

[Footnote 117: Tristan, 8th song, l. 4619 and onwards. The crucial passage is a sharp rebuke of "finders [vindaere, trouveres] of wild tales," or one particular such who plays tricks on his readers and utters unintelligible things. It may be Wolfram: it also may not be.]

[Sidenote: Hartmann von Aue.]

Hartmann von Aue,[118] the subject of Gottfried's highest eulogy, has left a bulkier—at least a more varied—poetical baggage than his eulogist, whose own legacy is not small. It will depend a good deal on individual taste whether his actual poetical powers be put lower or higher. We have of his, or attributed to him, two long romances of adventure, translations or adaptations of the Chevalier au Lyon and the Erec et Enide of Chrestien de Troyes; a certain number of songs, partly amatory, partly religious, two curious pieces entitled Die Klage and Buechlein, a verse-rendering of a subject which was much a favourite, the involuntary incest and atonement of St Gregory of the Rock; and lastly, his masterpiece, Der Arme Heinrich.

[Footnote 118: Ed. Bech. 3d ed., 3 vols. Leipzig, 1893.]

[Sidenote: Erec der Wanderaere and Iwein.]

In considering the two Arthurian adventure-stories, it is fair to remember that in Gottfried's case we have not the original, while in Hartmann's we have, and that the originals here are two of the very best examples in their kind and language. That Hartmann did not escape the besetting sin of all adapters, and especially of all mediaeval adapters, the sin of amplification and watering down, is quite true. It is shown by the fact that while Chrestien contents himself in each case with less than seven thousand lines (and he has never been thought a laconic poet), Hartmann extends both in practically the same measure (though the licences above referred to make the lines often much shorter than the French, while Hartmann himself does not often make them much longer)—in the one case to over eight thousand lines, in the other to over ten. But it would not be fair to deny very considerable merits to his versions. They are readable with interest after the French itself: and in the case of Erec after the Mabinogion and the Idylls of the King also. It cannot be said, however, that in either piece the poet handles his subject with the same appearance of mastery which belongs to Gottfried: and this is not to be altogether accounted for by the fact that the stories themselves are less interesting. Or rather it may be said that his selection of these stories, good as they are in their way, when greater were at his option, somewhat "speaks him" as a poet.

[Sidenote: Lyrics.]

The next or lyrical division shows Hartmann more favourably, though still not exactly as a great poet. The "Frauenminne," or profane division, of these has something of the artificial character which used very unjustly to be charged against the whole love-poetry of the Middle Ages, and which certainly does affect some of it. There is nowhere the "cry" that we find in the best of Gottfried's "nightingales"—the lyric poets as opposed to the epic. He does not seem to have much command of trisyllabic measures, and is perhaps happiest in the above-mentioned mono-rhymed quatrain, apparently a favourite measure then, which he uses sometimes in octosyllables, but often also in decasyllables. I do not know, and it would probably be difficult to say, what was the first appearance of the decasyllable, which in German, as in English, was to become on the whole the staple measure of non-lyrical poetry and the not infrequent medium of lyrical. But this must be fairly early, and certainly is a good example. The "Gottesminne," or, as our own old word has it, the "Divine" Poems, are very much better. Hartmann himself was a crusader, and there is nothing merely conventional in his few lays from the crusading and pilgrim standpoint. Indeed the very first words, expressing his determination after his lord's death to leave the world to itself, have a better ring than anything in his love-poetry; and the echo is kept up in such simple but true sayings as this about "Christ's flowers" (the badge of the cross):—

"Min froude wart nie sorgelos Unz an die tage Daz ich mir Krystes bluomon kos Die ich hie trage."

[Sidenote: The "booklets."]

The two curious booklets or complaints (for each bore the title of Buechlein in its own day, and each is a Klage) and the Gregorius touch the lyric on one side and the adventure poems on the other. Gregorius, indeed, is simply a roman d'aventures of pious tendency; and there cannot be very much doubt that it had a French original. It extends to some four thousand lines, and does not show any poetical characteristics very different from those of Erec and Iwein, though they are applied to different matter. In size the two "booklets" stand in a curiously diminishing ratio to Erec with its ten thousand verses, Iwein with its eight, and Gregorius with its four; for Die Klage has a little under two thousand, and the Buechlein proper a little under one. Die Klage is of varied structure, beginning with octosyllables, of which the first—

"Minne waltet grozer kraft"—

has a pleasant trochaic cadence: continuing after some sixteen hundred lines (if indeed it be a continuation and not a new poem) in curious long laisses, rather than stanzas, of eights and sevens rhymed on one continuous pair of single and double rhymes, cit unde: ant ende, &c. The Buechlein proper is all couplets, and ends less deplorably than its beginning—

"Owe, Owe, unde owe!"—

might suggest. It is, however, more serious than the Klage, which is really a debat (as the technical term in French poetry then went) between Body and Soul, and of no unusual kind.

[Sidenote: Der Arme Heinrich.]

Fortunately for Hartmann, he has left another work, Der Arme Heinrich, which is thought to be his last, and is certainly his most perfect. It is almost a pity that Longfellow, in his adaptation of it, did not stick closer to the original; for pleasant as The Golden Legend is, it is more of a pastiche and mosaic than Der Arme Heinrich, one of the simplest, most direct, and most touching of mediaeval poems. Heinrich (also Von Aue) is a noble who, like Sir Isumbras and other examples of the no less pious than wise belief of the Middle Ages in Nemesis, forgets God and is stricken for his sin with leprosy. He can only recover by the blood of a pure maiden; and half despairing of, half revolting at, such a cure, he gives away all his property but one farm, and lives there in misery. The farmer's daughter learns his doom and devotes herself. Heinrich refuses for a time, but yields: and they travel to Salerno, where, as the sacrifice is on the point of completion, Heinrich sees the maiden's face through a crack in the doctor's room-wall, feels the impossibility of allowing her to die, and stops the crime. He is rewarded by a cure as miraculous as was his harm; recovers his fortune, and marries the maiden. A later termination separates them again; but this is simply the folly and bad taste of a certain, and only a certain, perversion of mediaeval sentiment, the crowning instance of which is found in Guy of Warwick. Hartmann himself was no such simpleton; and (with only an infinitesimal change of a famous sentence) we may be sure that as he was a good lover so he made a good end to his story.

[Sidenote: Wolfram von Eschenbach.]

[Sidenote: Titurel.]

Although German writers may sometimes have mispraised or over-praised their greatest mediaeval poet, it certain that we find in Wolfram von Eschenbach[119] qualities which, in the thousand years between the Fall and the Renaissance of classical literature, can be found to anything like the same extent in only two known writers, the Italian Dante and the Englishman Langland; while if he is immensely Dante's inferior in poetical quality, he has at least one gift, humour, which Dante had not, and is far Langland's superior in variety and in romantic charm. He displays, moreover, a really curious contrast to the poets already mentioned, and to most of the far greater number not mentioned. It is in Wolfram first that we come across, in anything like noticeable measure, that mastery of poetical mysticism which is the pride, and justly the pride, of the German Muse. Gottfried and Hartmann are rather practical folk. Hartmann has at best a pious and Gottfried a profane fancy; of the higher qualities of imagination there is little or nothing in them; and not much in the vast crowd of the Minnesingers, from the chief "nightingale" Walther downwards. Wolfram, himself a Minnesinger (indeed the term is loosely applied to all the poets of this time, and may be very properly claimed by Gottfried and Hartmann, though the former has left no lyric), has left us few but very remarkable aubades, in which the commonplace of the morning-song, with its disturbance of lovers, is treated in no commonplace way. But his fame rests on the three epics, Parzival, Titurel, and Willehalm. It is practically agreed that Parzival represents the flourishing time, and Willehalm the evening, of his work; there is more critical disagreement about the time of composition of Titurel, which, though it was afterwards continued and worked up by another hand, exists only in fragments, and presents a very curious difference of structure as compared both with Parzival (with which in subject it is connected) and with Willehalm. Both these are in octosyllables: Titurel is in a singular and far from felicitous stanza, which stands to that of Kudrun much as the Kudrun stanza does to that of the Nibelungen. Here there are none but double rhymes; and not merely the second half of the fourth, but the second half of the second line "tails out" in the manner formerly described. The consequence is, that while in Kudrun it is, as was remarked, difficult to get any swing on the metre, in Titurel it is simply impossible; and it has been thought without any improbability that the fragmentary condition of the piece is due to the poet's reasonable discontent with the shackles he had imposed on himself. The substance is good enough, and would have made an interesting chapter in the vast working up of the Percevale story which Wolfram probably had in his mind.

[Footnote 119: Complete works. Ed. Lachmann. Berlin, 1838. Parzival und Titurel. 2 vols. Ed. Bartsch. Leipzig, 1870.]

[Sidenote: Willehalm.]

Willehalm, on the other hand, is not only in form but in substance a following of the French, and of no less a French poem than the Battle of Aliscans, which has been so fully dealt with above. It is interesting to compare advocates of the two, and see how German critics usually extol the improvements made by the German poet, while the French sneer at his preachments and waterings-down. But we need say nothing more than that if Wolfram's fame rested on Willehalm, the notice of him here would probably not go beyond a couple of lines.

[Sidenote: Parzival.]

Parzival, however, is a very different matter. It has of late years received adventitious note from the fact of its selection by Wagner as a libretto; but it did not need this, and it was the admiration of every fit reader long before the opera appeared. The Percevale story, it may be remembered, lies somewhat outside of the main Arthurian legend, which, however, had hardly taken full form when Wolfram wrote. It has been strongly fought for by the Celticists as traceable originally to the Welsh legend of Peredur; but it is to be observed that neither in this form nor in the English version (which figures among the Thornton Romances) does the Graal make any figure. In the huge poem, made huger by continuators, of Chrestien de Troyes, Percival becomes a Graal-seeker; and on the whole it would appear that, as observed before, he in point of time anticipates Galahad and the story which works the Graal thoroughly into the main Arthurian tale. According to Wolfram (but this is a romantic commonplace), Chrestien was culpably remiss in telling the story, and his deficiencies had to be made up by a certain Provencal named Kyot. Unfortunately there are no traces elsewhere of any such person, or of any version, in Provencal or otherwise, between Chrestien's and Wolfram's. The two, however, stand far enough apart to have admitted of more than one intermediary; or rather no number of intermediaries could really have bridged the chasm, which is one of spirit rather than of matter. In Percevale le Gallois, though the Graal exists, and though the adventures are rather more on the outside of the strictly Arthurian cycle than usual, we are still in close relations with that cycle, and the general tone and handling are similar (except in so far as Chrestien is a better trouvere than most) to those of fifty other poems. In Parzival we are translated into another country altogether. Arthur appears but seldom, and though the link with the Round Table is maintained by the appearances of Gawain, who as often, though not always, plays to Percevale the part of light to serious hero, here almost only, and here not always, are we in among "kenned folk." The Graal mountain, Montsalvatsch, is even more in fairyland than the "enchanted towers of Carbonek"; the magician Klingschor is a more shadowy person far than Merlin.

"Cundrie la Sorziere Diu unsueze und doch diu fiere"

is a much more weird personage than Morgane or Nimue, though she may also be more "unsweet." Part of this unfamiliar effect is no doubt due to Wolfram's singular fancy for mutilating and torturing his French names, to his admixture of new characters and adventures, and especially to the almost entirely new genealogy which he introduces. In the pedigree, containing nearly seventy names, which will be found at the end of Bartsch's edition, not a tithe will be familiar to the reader of the English and French romances; and that reader will generally find those whom he does know provided with new fathers and mothers, daughters and wives.

But these would be very small matters if it were not for other differences, not of administration but of spirit. There may have been something too much of the attempt to credit Wolfram with anti-dogmatic views, and with a certain Protestant preference of simple repentance and amendment to the performance of stated rites and penances. What is unmistakable is the way in which he lifts the story, now by phrase, now by verse effect, now by the indefinable magic of sheer poetic handling, out of ordinary ways into ways that are not ordinary. There may perhaps be allowed to be a certain want of "architectonic" in him. He has not made of Parzival and Condwiramurs, of Gawain and Orgeluse, anything like the complete drama which we find (brought out by the genius of Malory, but existing before) in the French-English Arthurian legend. But any one who knows the origins of that legend from Erec et Enide to Durmart le Gallois, and from the Chevalier au Lyon to the Chevalier as Deux Espees, must recognise in him something higher and larger than can be found in any of them, as well as something more human, if even in the best sense more fairy-tale like, than the earlier and more Western legends of the Graal as we have them in Merlin and the other French books. Here again, not so much for the form as for the spirit, we find ourselves driven to the word "great"—a great word, and one not to be misused as it so often is.

[Sidenote: Walther von der Vogelweide.]

Yet it may be applied in a different sense, though without hesitation, to our fourth selected name, Walther von der Vogelweide,[120] a name in itself so agreeable that one really has to take care lest it raise an undue prejudice in his favour. Perhaps a part of his greatness belongs to him as the chief representative of a class, not, as in Wolfram's case, because of individual merit,—a part also to his excellence of form, which is a claim always regarded with doubt and dislike by some, though not all. It is nearly a quarter of a century since the present writer first possessed himself of and first read the delectable volume in which Franz Pfeiffer opened his series of German Classics of the Middle Ages with this singer; and every subsequent reading, in whole or in part, has only increased his attraction. There are some writers—not many—who seem to defy criticism by a sort of native charm, and of these Walther is one. If we listen to some grave persons, it is a childish thing to write a poem, as he does his second Lied, in stanzas every one of which is mono-rhymed on a different vowel. But as one reads

"Diu werlt was gelf, roet unde bla,"[121]

one only prays for more such childishness. Is there a better song of May and maidens than

"So diu bluomen uz dem grase dringent"?

where the very phrase is romance and nature itself, and could never be indulged in by a "classical" poet, who would say (very justly), "flowers grow in beds, not grass; and if in the latter, they ought to be promptly mown and rolled down." How intoxicating, after deserts of iambs, is the dactylic swell of

"Wol mich der stunde, daz ich sie erkande"!

how endearing the drooping cadence of

"Bin ich dir unmaere Des enweiz ich niht; ich minne dich"!

how small the change which makes a jewel out of a commonplace in

"Si hat ein kussen daz ist rot"!

[Footnote 120: Ed. Bartsch. 4th ed. Leipzig, 1873.]

[Footnote 121:

"Diu werlt was gelf, roet unde bla, grueen, in dem walde und anderswa kleine vogele sungen da. nu schriet aber den nebelkra. pfligt s'iht ander varwe? ja, s'ist worden bleich und uebergra: des rimpfet sich vil manic bra."

Similar stanzas in e, i, o, u follow in order.]

But to go through the nearly two hundred pieces of Walther's lyric would be here impossible. His Leich, his only example of that elaborate kind, the most complicated of the early German lyrical forms, is not perhaps his happiest effort; and his Sprueche, a name given to short lyrical pieces in which the Minnesingers particularly delighted, and which correspond pretty nearly, though not exactly, to the older sense of "epigram," seldom, though sometimes, possess the charm of the Lieder themselves. But these Lieder are, for probable freedom from indebtedness and intrinsic exquisiteness of phrase and rhythm, unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled. To compare Walther to Petrarch, and to talk of the one being superior or inferior to the other, is to betray hopeless insensibility to the very rudiments of criticism. They are absolutely different,—the one the embodiment of stately form and laboured intellectual effort—of the Classical spirit; the other the mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate, all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the very inseparable garment of Romance. Some may like one better, others the other; the more fortunate may enjoy both. But the greatest of all gulfs is the gulf fixed between the Classical and the Romantic; and few there are, it seems, who can cross it.

[Sidenote: Personality of the poets.]

Perhaps something may be expected as to the personality of these poets, a matter which has had too great a place assigned to it in literary history. Luckily, unless he delights in unbridled guessing, the historian of mediaeval literature is better entitled to abstain from it than any other. But something may perhaps be said of the men whose work has just been discussed, for there are not uninteresting shades of difference between them. In Germany, as in France, the trouvere-jongleur class existed; the greater part of the poetry of the twelfth century, including the so-called small epics, Koenig Rother and the rest, is attributed to them, and they were the objects of a good deal of patronage from the innumerable nobles, small and great, of the Empire. On the other hand, though some men of consequence were poets, the proportion of these is, on the whole, considerably less than in France proper or in Provence. The German noble was not so much literary as a patron of literature, like that Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, whose court saw the fabulous or semi-fabulous "War of the Wartburg," with Wolfram von Eschenbach and Heinrich von Ofterdingen as chief champions. Indeed this court was the main resort of German poets and minstrels till Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in the next generation proved herself a rather "sair sanct" for literature, which has since returned her good for evil.

To return to our four selected poets. Gottfried is supposed to have been neither noble, nor even directly attached to a noble household, nor a professional minstrel, but a burgher of the town which gives him his name—indeed a caution is necessary to the effect that the von of these early designations, like the de of their French originals, is by no means, as a rule, a sign of nobility. Hartmann von Aue, though rather attached to than a member of the noble family of the same name from which he has taken the hero of Der Arme Heinrich, seems to have been admitted to knightly society, was a crusader, and appears to have been of somewhat higher rank than Gottfried, whom, however, he resembled in this point, that both were evidently men of considerable education. We rise again in status, though probably not in wealth, and certainly not in education, when we come to Wolfram von Eschenbach. He was of a family of Northern Bavaria or Middle Franconia; he bore (for there are diversities on this heraldic point) two axe-blades argent on a field gules, or a bunch of five flowers argent springing from a water-bouget gules; and he is said by witnesses in 1608 to have been described on his tombstone as a knight. But he was certainly poor, had not received much education, and he was attached in the usual guest-dependant fashion of the time to the Margrave of Vohburg (whose wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria, received his poetical declarations) and to Hermann of Thuringia. He was a married man, and had a daughter.

Lastly, Walther von der Vogelweide appears to have been actually a "working poet," as we may say—a trouvere, who sang his own poems as he wandered about, and whose surname was purely a decorative one. He lived, no doubt, by gifts; indeed, the historians are proud to record that a bishop gave him a fur coat precisely on the 12th of November 1203. He was probably born in Austria, lived at Vienna with Duke Frederic of Babenberg for some time, and held poetical offices in the households of several other princes, including the Emperor Frederick II., who gave him an estate at last. It should be said that there are those who insist that he also was of knightly position, and was Vogelweide of that ilk, inasmuch as we find him called "herr," the supposed mark of distinction of a gentleman at the time. Such questions are of importance in their general bearing on the question of literature at given dates, not in respect of individual persons. It must be evident that no word which, like "herr," is susceptible of general as well as technical meanings, can be absolutely decisive in such a case, unless we find it in formal documents. Also, after Frederick's gift Walther would have been entitled to it, though he was not before. At any rate, the entirely wandering life, and the constant relationship to different protectors, which are in fact the only things we know about him, are more in accordance with the notion of a professional minstrel than with that of a man who, like Wolfram, even if he had no estate and was not independent of patronage, yet had a settled home of his own, and was buried where he was born.

[Sidenote: The Minnesingers generally.]

The introduction of what may be called a representative system into literary history has been here rendered necessary by the fact that the school-resemblance so common in mediaeval writers is nowhere more common than among the Minnesingers,[122] and that the latter are extraordinarily numerous, if not also extraordinarily monotonous. One famous collection contains specimens of 160 poets, and even this is not likely to include the whole of those who composed poetry of the kind before Minnesong changed (somewhere in the thirteenth century or at the beginning of the fourteenth, but at times and in manners which cannot be very precisely fixed) into Meistersong. The chief lyric poets before Walther were Heinrich von Veldeke, his contemporary and namesake Heinrich von Morungen, and Reinmar von Hagenau, whom Gottfried selects as Walther's immediate predecessor in "nightingaleship": the chief later ones, Neidhart von Regenthal, famous for dance-songs; Tannhaeuser, whose actual work, however, is of a mostly burlesque character, as different as possible from, and perhaps giving rise by very contrast to, the beautiful and terrible legend which connects his name with the Venus-berg (though Heine has managed in his version to combine the two elements); Ulrich von Lichtenstein, half an apostle, half a caricaturist of Frauendienst on the Provencal model; and, finally, Frauenlob or Heinrich von Meissen, who wrote at the end of our period and the beginning of the next for nearly fifty years, and may be said to be the link between Minnesong and Meistersong.

[Footnote 122: The standard edition or corpus of their work is that of Von der Hagen, in three large vols. Leipzig, 1838.]

So also in the other departments of poetry, harbingers, contemporaries, and continuators, some of whom have been mentioned, most of whom it would be impossible to mention, group round the greater masters, and as in France, so here, the departments themselves branch out in an almost bewildering manner. Germany, as may be supposed, had its full share of that "poetry of information" which constitutes so large a part of mediaeval verse, though here even more than elsewhere such verse is rarely, except by courtesy, poetry. Families of later handlings, both of the folk epic and the literary romances, exist, such as the Rosengarten, the Horny Siegfried, and the story of Wolfdietrich in the one class; Wigalois and Wigamur, and a whole menagerie of poems deriving from the Chevalier au Lyon, on the other. With the general growth, half epidemic, half directly borrowed from France, of abstraction and allegory (vide next chapter), Satire made its way, and historians generally dwell on the "Frau Welt" of Konrad von Wurzburg in the middle of the thirteenth century, in which Wirent von Grafenburg (a well-known poet among the literary school, the author of Wigalois) is brought face to face with an incarnation of the World and its vanity. Volumes on volumes of moral poetry date from the thirteenth century, and culminate in the somewhat well-known Renner[123] of Hugo von Trimberg, dating from the very last year of our period: perhaps the most noteworthy is the Bescheidenheit of Freidank, a crusader trouvere who accompanied Frederick II. to the East. But in all this Germany is only following the general habit of the age, and to a great extent copying directly. Even in those greater writers who have been here noticed there is, as we have seen, not a little imitation; but the national and individual peculiarities more than excuse this. The national epics, with the Nibelungenlied at their head, the Arthurian stories transformed, of which in different ways Tristan and Parzival, but especially the latter, are the chief, and the Minnesong,—these are the great contributions of Germany during the period, and they are great indeed.

[Footnote 123: On this see the last passage, except the conclusion on Reynard the Fox, of Carlyle's Essay on "Early German Literature" noted above. Of the great romances, as distinguished from the Nibelungen, Carlyle did not know much, and he was not quite in sympathy either with their writers or with the Minnesingers proper. But the life-philosopher of Reynard and the Renner attracted him.]



CHAPTER VII.

THE 'FOX,' THE 'ROSE,' AND THE MINOR CONTRIBUTIONS OF FRANCE.

THE PREDOMINANCE OF FRANCE. THE RISE OF ALLEGORY. LYRIC. THE "ROMANCE" AND THE "PASTOURELLE." THE "FABLIAUX." THEIR ORIGIN. THEIR LICENCE. THEIR WIT. DEFINITION AND SUBJECTS. EFFECT OF THE "FABLIAUX" ON LANGUAGE. AND ON NARRATIVE. CONDITIONS OF "FABLIAU"-WRITING. THE APPEARANCE OF IRONY. FABLES PROPER. 'REYNARD THE FOX.' ORDER OF TEXTS. PLACE OF ORIGIN. THE FRENCH FORM. ITS COMPLICATIONS. UNITY OF SPIRIT. THE RISE OF ALLEGORY. THE SATIRE OF 'RENART.' THE FOX HIMSELF. HIS CIRCLE. THE BURIAL OF RENART. THE 'ROMANCE OF THE ROSE.' WILLIAM OF LORRIS AND JEAN DE MEUNG. THE FIRST PART. ITS CAPITAL VALUE. THE ROSE-GARDEN. "DANGER." "REASON." "SHAME" AND "SCANDAL." THE LATER POEM. "FALSE-SEEMING." CONTRAST OF THE PARTS. VALUE OF BOTH, AND CHARM OF THE FIRST. MARIE DE FRANCE AND RUTEBOEUF. DRAMA. ADAM DE LA HALLE. "ROBIN ET MARION." THE "JEU DE LA FEUILLIE." COMPARISON OF THEM. EARLY FRENCH PROSE. LAWS AND SERMONS. VILLEHARDOUIN. WILLIAM OF TYRE. JOINVILLE. FICTION. 'AUCASSIN ET NICOLETTE.'

[Sidenote: The predominance of France.]

The contributions of France to European literature mentioned in the three chapters (II.-IV.) which deal with the three main sections of Romance, great as we have seen them to be, by no means exhausted the debt which literature owes to her during this period. It is indeed not a little curious that the productions of this time, long almost totally ignored in France itself, and even now rather grudgingly acknowledged there, are the only periodic set of productions that justify the claim, so often advanced by Frenchmen, that their country is at the head of the literary development of Europe. It was not so in the fourteenth century, when not only Chaucer in England, but Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy, attained literary heights to which none of their French contemporaries even approached. It was not so in the fifteenth, when France, despite Villon and others, was the very School of Dulness, and even England, with the help of the Scottish poets and Malory, had a slight advantage over her, while she was far outstripped by Italy. It was not so in the sixteenth, when Italy hardly yet fell behind, and Spain and England far outwent her: nor, according to any just estimate, in the seventeenth. In the eighteenth her pale correctness looks faint enough, not merely beside the massive strength of England, but beside the gathering force of Germany: and if she is the equal of the best in the nineteenth, it is at the very most a bare equality. But in the twelfth and thirteenth France, if not Paris, was in reality the eye and brain of Europe, the place of origin of almost every literary form, the place of finishing and polishing, even for those forms which she did not originate. She not merely taught, she wrought—and wrought consummately. She revived and transformed the fable; perfected, if she did not invent, the beast-epic; brought the short prose tale to an exquisite completeness; enlarged, suppled, chequered, the somewhat stiff and monotonous forms of Provencal lyric into myriad-noted variety; devised the prose-memoir, and left capital examples of it; made attempts at the prose history; ventured upon much and performed no little in the vernacular drama; besides the vast performance, sometimes inspired from elsewhere but never as literature copied, which we have already seen, in her fostering if not mothering of Romance. When a learned and enthusiastic Icelander speaks of his patrimony in letters as "a native literature which, in originality, richness, historical and artistic worth, stands unrivalled in modern Europe," we can admire the patriot but must shake our heads at the critic. For by Dr Vigfusson's own confession the strength of Icelandic literature consists in the sagas, and the sagas are the product of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At that very time France, besides the chansons de geste—as native, as original, as the sagas, and if less rich, far more artistic in form—France has to show the great romances proper, which Iceland herself, like all the world, copied, a lyric of wonderful charm and abundance, the vast comic wealth of the fabliaux, and the Fox-epic, prose not merely of laws and homilies and rudimentary educational subjects, but of every variety, drama, history, philosophy, allegory, dream.

[Sidenote: The rise of Allegory.]

To give an account of these various things in great detail would not merely be impossible here, but would injure the scheme and thwart the purpose of this history. We must survey them in the gross, or with a few examples—showing the lessons taught and the results achieved, from the lyric, which was probably the earliest, to the drama and the prose story, which were pretty certainly the latest of the French experiments. But we must give largest space to the singular growth of Allegory. This, to some extent in the beast-epic, to a far greater in one of the most epoch-making of European books, the Romance of the Rose, set a fashion in Europe which had hardly passed away in three hundred years, and which, latterly rather for the worse, but in the earlier date not a little for the better, coloured not merely the work directly composed in imitation of the great originals, but all literary stuff of every kind, from lyric to drama, and from sermons to prose tales.

[Sidenote: Lyric.]

It has been said elsewhere that the shaping of a prosody suitable for lyric was the great debt which Europe owes to the language of Provence. And this is not at all inconsistent with the undoubted critical fact that in a Corpus Lyricorum the best songs of the northern tongues would undoubtedly rank higher, according to all sound canons of poetical criticism, than the best lyrics of the southern. For, as it happens, we have lyrics in at least two most vigorous northern tongues before they had gone to school to southern prosody, and we can see at once the defects in them. The scanty remains of Anglo-Saxon lyric and the more copious remains of Icelandic display, with no little power and pathos, and plenty of ill-organised "cry," an almost total lack of ability to sing. Every now and then their natural genius enables them to hit, clumsily and laboriously, on something—the refrain of the Complaint of Deor, the stepped stanzas of the Lesson of Loddfafni—resembling the more accomplished methods of more educated and long-descended literatures. But the poets are always in a Robinson Crusoe condition, and worse: for Robinson had at least seen the tools and utensils he needed, if he did not know how to make them. The scops and scalds were groping for the very pattern of the tools themselves.

The langue d'oc, first of all vernacular tongues, borrowed from Latin, as Latin had borrowed from Greek, such of the practical outcomes of the laws of lyric harmony in Aryan speech as were suitable to itself; and passed the lesson on to the trouveres of the north of France—if indeed these did not work out the transfer for themselves almost independently. And as there was much more northern admixture, and in particular a less tyrannous softness of vowel-ending in the langue d'oil, this second stage saw a great increase of suppleness, a great emancipation from monotony, a wonderful freshness and wealth of colour and form. It has been said, and I see no reason to alter the saying, that the French tongue in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was actually better suited for lyrical poetry, and did actually produce lyrical poetry, as far as prosody is concerned, of a fresher, freer, more spontaneous kind, from the twelfth century to the beginning of the fifteenth than has ever been the case since.[124]

[Footnote 124: This is not inconsistent with allowing that no single French lyric poet is the equal of Walther von der Vogelweide, and that the exercises of all are hampered by the lack—after the earliest examples—of trisyllabic metres.]

M. Alfred Jeanroy has written a learned and extensive monograph on Les Origines de la Poesie Lyrique en France, which with M. Gaston Raynaud's Bibliographie des Chansonniers Francais, and his collection of Motets of our present period, is indispensable to the thorough student of the subject.[125] But for general literary purposes the two classics of the matter are, and are long likely to be, the charming Romancero Francais[126] which M. Paulin Paris published in the very dawn of the study of mediaeval literature in France, and the admirable Romanzen und Pastourellen[127] which Herr Karl Bartsch collected and issued a quarter of a century ago. Here as elsewhere the piecemeal system of publication which has been the bane of the whole subject is to be regretted, for with a little effort and a little division of labour the entire corpus of French lyric from the tenth to the fourteenth century might have been easily set before the public. But the two volumes above mentioned will enable the reader to judge its general characteristics with pretty absolute sureness; and if he desires to supplement them with the work of a single author, that of Thibaut of Champagne or Navarre,[128] which is easily accessible, will form an excellent third.

[Footnote 125: M. Jeanroy, as is also the case with other writers of monographs mentioned in this chapter, has contributed to M. Petit de Julleville's Histoire (v. p. 23) on his subject.]

[Footnote 126: Paris, 1833.]

[Footnote 127: Leipzig, 1870.]

[Footnote 128: Rheims, 1851.]

[Sidenote: The Romance and the Pastourelle.]

In this northern lyric—that is to say, northern as compared with Provencal[129]—we find all or almost all the artificial forms which are characteristic of Provencal itself, some of them no doubt rather sisters than daughters of their analogues in the langue d'oc. Indeed, at the end of our present period, and still more later, the ingenuity of the trouveres seems to have pushed the strictly formal, strictly artificial part of the poetry of the troubadours to almost its furthest possible limits in varieties of triolet and rondeau, ballade and chant royal. But the Romances and the Pastourelles stand apart from these, and both are recognised by authorities among the troubadours themselves as specially northern forms. The differentia of each is in subject rather than in form, the "romance" in this sense being a short love-story, with little more than a single incident in it sometimes, but still always possessing an incident; the Pastourelle, a special variety of love-story of the kind so curiously popular in all mediaeval languages, and so curiously alien from modern experience, where a passing knight sees a damsel of low degree, and woos her at once, with or without success, or where two personages of the shepherd kind sue and are sued with evil hap or good. In other words, the "romance" is supremely presented in English, and in the much-abused fifteenth century, by the Nut-Browne Maid, the "pastourelle" by Henryson's Robene and Makyne. Perhaps there is nothing quite so good as either in the French originals of both; certainly there is nothing like the union of metrical felicity, romantic conduct, sweet but not mawkish sentiment, and never-flagging interest in the anonymous masterpiece which the ever-blessed Arnold preserved for us in his Chronicle. But the diffused merits—the so-to-speak "class-merits"—of the poems in general are very high indeed: and when the best of the other lyrics—aubades, debats, and what not—are joined to them, they supply the materials of an anthology of hardly surpassed interest, as well for the bubbling music of their refrains and the trill of their metre, as for the fresh mirth and joy of living in their matter. The "German paste in our composition," as another Arnold had it, and not only that, may make us prefer the German examples; but it must never be forgotten that but for these it is at least not improbable that those would never have existed.

[Footnote 129: This for convenience' sake is postponed to chap. viii.]

To select capital examples from so large a body is no easy task. One or two, indeed, have "made fortune," the most famous of them being the great aubade (chief among its kind, as "En un vergier sotz folha d'albespi" is among the Provencal albas), which begins—

"Gaite de la tor, Gardez entor Les murs, si Deus vos voie;"[130]

and where the gaite (watcher) answers (like a Cornish watcher of the pilchards)—

"Hu! et hu! et hu! et hu!"

[Footnote 130: Romancero Francais, p. 66.]

Then there is the group, among the oldest and the best of all, assigned to Audefroy le Batard—a most delectable garland, which tells how the loves of Gerard and Fair Isabel are delayed (with the refrain "et joie atent Gerars"), and how the joy comes at last; of "belle Ydoine" and her at first ill-starred passion for "li cuens [the Count] Garsiles"; of Beatrix and Guy; of Argentine, whose husband better loved another; of Guy the second, who aima Emmelot de foi—all charming pieces of early verse. And then there are hundreds of others, assigned or anonymous, in every tone, from the rather unreasonable request of the lady who demands—

"Por coi me bast mes maris? laysette!"

immediately answering her own question by confessing that he has found her embracing her lover, and threatening further justification; through the less impudent but still not exactly correct morality of "Henri and Aiglentine," to the blameless loves of Roland and "Bele Erembors" and the moniage of "Bele Doette" after her lover's death, with the words—

"Tant mar i fustes, cuens Do, frans de nature, por vostre aor vestrai je la haire ne sur mon cors n'arai pelice vaire."

This conduct differs sufficiently from that of the unnamed heroine of another song, who in the sweetest and smoothest of verse bids her husband never to mind if she stays with her lover that night, for the night is very short, and he, the husband, shall have her back to-morrow!

And besides the morality, perverse or touching, the quaint manners, the charming unusual names or forms of names, Oriour, Oriolanz, Ysabiaus, Aigline,—there are delightful fancies, borrowed often since:—

"Li rossignox est mon pere, Qui chante sur la ramee el plus haut boscage; La seraine ele est ma mere, qui chante en la mer salee el plus haut rivage."

Something in the very sound of the language keeps for us the freshness of the imagery—the sweet-briar and the hawthorn, the mavis and the oriole—which has so long become publica materies. It is not withered and hackneyed by time and tongues as, save when genius touches it, it is now. The dew is still on all of it; and, thanks to the dead language, the dead manners, it will always be on. All is just near enough to us for it to be enjoyed, as we cannot enjoy antiquity or the East; and yet the "wall of glass" which seven centuries interpose, while hiding nothing, keeps all intact, unhackneyed, strange, fresh. There may be better poetry in the world than these twelfth and thirteenth century French lyrics: there is certainly higher, grander, more respectable. But I doubt whether there is any sweeter or, in a certain sense, more poignant. The nightingale and the mermaid were justified of their children.

It is little wonder that all Europe soon tried to imitate notes so charming, and in some cases, though other languages were far behind French in development, tried successfully. Our own "Alison,"[131] the first note of true English lyric, is a "romance" of the most genuine kind; the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, of which we have also spoken, though they may rise higher, yet owe their French originals service, hold of them, would either never or much later have come into existence but for them. An astonishing privilege for a single nation to have enjoyed, if only for a short time; a privilege almost more astonishing in its reception than even in itself. France could point to the chansons and to the romances, to Audefroy le Bastard and Chrestien of Troyes, to Villehardouin and Thibaut, to William of Lorris and John of Meung, to the fabliaux writers and the cyclists of Renart, in justification of her claims. She shut them up; she forgot them; she sneered at them whenever they were remembered; and she appointed as her attorneys in the court of Parnassus Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux and Francois Arouet de Voltaire!

[Footnote 131: See p. 210.]

[Sidenote: The Fabliaux.]

No more curious contrast, but also none which could more clearly show the enormous vigour and the unique variety of the French genius at this time, can be imagined than that which is presented by the next division to which we come—the division occupied by the celebrated poems, or at least verse-compositions, known as fabliaux. These, for reasons into which it is perhaps better not to inquire too closely, have been longer and better known than any other division of old French poetry. They were first collected and published a hundred and forty years ago by Barbazan; they were much commented on by Le Grand d'Aussy in the last years of the last century, were again published in the earlier years of the present by Meon, and recently have been re-collected, divested of some companions not strictly of their kind, and published in an edition desirable in every respect by M. Anatole de Montaiglon and M. Gaston Raynaud.[132] Since this collection M. Bedier has executed a monograph upon them which stands to the subject much as that of M. Jeanroy does to the Lyrics. But a great deal of it is occupied by speculations, more interesting to the folk-lorist than to the student of literature, as to the origin of the stories themselves. This, though a question of apparently inexhaustible attraction to some people, must not occupy us very long here. It shall be enough to say that many of these subjects are hardy perennials which meet us in all literatures, and the existence of which is more rationally to be accounted for by the supposition of a certain common form of story, resulting partly from the conditions of human life and character, partly from the conformation of the human intellect, than by supposing deliberate transmission and copying from one nation to another. For this latter explanation is one of those which, as has been said, only push ignorance further back; and in fact, leave us at the last with no alternative except that which we might have adopted at the first.

[Footnote 132: 6 vols. Paris, 1872-90.]

[Sidenote: Their origin.]

That, however, some assistance may have been given to the general tendency to produce the same forms by the literary knowledge of earlier, especially Eastern, collections of tales is no extravagant supposition, and is helped by the undoubted fact that actual translations of such collections—Dolopathos, the Seven Sages of Rome,[133] and so forth—are found early in French, and chiefly at second-hand from the French in other languages. But the general tendency of mankind, reinforced and organised by a certain specially literary faculty and adaptability in the French genius, is on the whole sufficient to account for the fabliau.