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
WANDERÆRE' 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 _König 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
Sinfiötli, 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 mediæval 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 _Laxdæla_, 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 mediæval 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 _König
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. _König 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 Æneid, 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 _Büchlein_, 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 _trouvère_ 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 _trouvère_, 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 anapæsts 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 Isôt, diu schoene Isôt,
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 Camoenæ, 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 [_vindære_, _trouvères_] 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 Énide_ of Chrestien de Troyes; a certain number of songs,
partly amatory, partly religious, two curious pieces entitled _Die
Klage_ and _Büchlein_, 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 Wanderære _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 mediæval
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
_Büchlein_ 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
_Büchlein_ 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 _Büchlein_ proper is all couplets, and ends less
deplorably than its beginning--
"Owê, Owê, unde owê!"--
might suggest. It is, however, more serious than the _Klage_, which is
really a _débat_ (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
mediæval 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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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 Provençal named Kyot.
Unfortunately there are no traces elsewhere of any such person, or of
any version, in Provençal 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 _trouvère_ 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
Énide_ to _Durmart le Gallois_, and from the _Chevalier au Lyon_ to
the _Chevalier as Deux Espées_, 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, röt unde blâ,"[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 unmære
Des enweiz ich niht; ich minne dich"!
how small the change which makes a jewel out of a commonplace in
"Si hat ein _kûssen_ daz ist rot"!
[Footnote 120: Ed. Bartsch. 4th ed. Leipzig, 1873.]
[Footnote 121:
"Diu werlt was gelf, röt unde blâ,
grüen, in dem walde und anderswâ
kleine vogele sungen dâ.
nû schriet aber den nebelkrâ.
pfligt s'iht ander varwe? jâ,
s'ist worden bleich und übergrâ:
des rimpfet sich vil manic brâ."
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 _Sprüche_, 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 mediæval 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
_trouvère-jongleur_ class existed; the greater part of the poetry of
the twelfth century, including the so-called small epics, _König
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 _trouvère_, 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 mediæval 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; Tannhäuser, 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 Provençal 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 mediæval 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 _trouvère_ 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.]