[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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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--ill.u.s.trate 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 cla.s.sical, though more of a French, touch. We have spoken of the still earlier work of Conrad and Lamprecht, while in pa.s.sing must be mentioned other things fas.h.i.+oned after French patterns, such as the _Kaiserchronik_, which is attributed to Bavarian hands. The period of flouris.h.i.+ng 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 princ.i.p.als 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 apt.i.tude 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 disenc.u.mbers 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 _Buchlein_, 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 fas.h.i.+oners 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 att.i.tude 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 da.s.s 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 authors.h.i.+p 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 coa.r.s.er 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 const.i.tuted, 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 subst.i.tution 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 pa.s.sage[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 cla.s.sical 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 pa.s.sage 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 ent.i.tled _Die Klage_ and _Buchlein_, 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 t.i.tle of _Buchlein_ 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 diminis.h.i.+ng 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 _Buchlein_ 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 _Buchlein_ 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 n.o.ble who, like Sir Isumbras and other examples of the no less pious than wise belief of the Middle Ages in Nemesis, forgets G.o.d 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: t.i.turel.]
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 cla.s.sical 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_, _t.i.turel_, and _Willehalm_. It is practically agreed that _Parzival_ represents the flouris.h.i.+ng time, and _Willehalm_ the evening, of his work; there is more critical disagreement about the time of composition of _t.i.turel_, 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: _t.i.turel_ 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 _t.i.turel_ 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 t.i.turel._ 2 vols. Ed. Bartsch. Leipzig, 1870.]
[Sidenote: Willehalm.]