And yet, however different in all other respects, these men, if they once lift their steel beaver and unbuckle their rich armor, are wonderfully like ourselves. Let us read the poetry which they either wrote themselves, or to which they liked to listen in their castles on the Rhine or under their tents in Palestine, and we find it is poetry which a Tennyson or a Moore, a Goethe or Heine, might have written. Neither Julius Cæsar nor Themistocles would know what was meant by such poetry. It is modern poetry,—poetry unknown to the ancient world,—and who invented it nobody can tell. It is sometimes called Romantic, but this is a strange misnomer. Neither the Romans, nor the lineal descendants of the Romans, the Italians, the Provençals, the Spaniards, can claim that poetry as their own. It is Teutonic poetry,—purely [pg 053] Teutonic in its heart and soul, though its utterance, its rhyme and metre, its grace and imagery, show the marks of a warmer clime. It is called sentimental poetry, the poetry of the heart rather than of the head, the picture of the inward rather than of the outward world. It is subjective, as distinguished from objective poetry, as the German critics, in their scholastic language, are fond of expressing it. It is Gothic, as contrasted with classical poetry. The one, it is said, sublimizes nature, the other bodies forth spirit; the one deifies the human, the other humanizes the divine; the one is ethnic, the other Christian. But all these are but names, and their true meaning must be discovered in the works of art themselves, and in the history of the times which produced the artists, the poets, and their ideals. We shall perceive the difference between these two hemispheres of the Beautiful better if we think of Homer's “Helena” and Dante's “Beatrice,” if we look at the “Venus of Milo” and a “Madonna” of Francia, than in reading the profoundest systems of æsthetics.
The work which has caused these reflections is a volume of German poetry, just published by Lachmann and Haupt. It is called “Des Minnesangs Frühling,”—“the Spring of the Songs of Love;” and it contains a collection of the poems of twenty German poets, all of whom lived during the period of the Crusades, under the Hohenstaufen Emperors, from about 1170 to 1230. This period may well be called the spring of German poetry, though the summer that followed was but of short duration, and the autumn was cheated of the rich harvest which the spring had promised. Tieck, one of the first who gathered the flowers of that forgotten spring, describes it in glowing [pg 054] language. “At that time,” he says, “believers sang of faith, lovers of love, knights described knightly actions and battles; and loving, believing knights were their chief audience. The spring, beauty, gayety, were objects that could never tire: great duels and deeds of arms carried away every hearer, the more surely, the stronger they were painted; and as the pillars and dome of the church encircle the flock, so did religion, as the highest, encircle poetry and reality; and every heart, in equal love, humbled itself before her.” Carlyle, too, has listened with delight to those merry songs of spring. “Then truly,” he says, “was the time of singing come; for princes and prelates, emperors and squires, the wise and the simple, men, women, and children, all sang and rhymed, or delighted in hearing it done. It was a universal noise of song, as if the spring of manhood had arrived, and warblings from every spray—not, indeed, without infinite twitterings also, which, except their gladness, had no music—were bidding it welcome.” And yet it was not all gladness; and it is strange that Carlyle, who has so keen an ear for the silent melancholy of the human heart, should not have heard that tone of sorrow and fateful boding which breaks, like a suppressed sigh, through the free and light music of that Swabian era. The brightest sky of spring is not without its clouds in Germany, and the German heart is never happy without some sadness. Whether we listen to a short ditty, or to the epic ballads of the “Nibelunge,” or to Wolfram's grand poems of the “Parcival” and the “Holy Grail,” it is the same everywhere. There is always a mingling of light and shade,—in joy a fear of sorrow, in sorrow a ray of hope, and throughout the whole, a silent wondering [pg 055] at this strange world. Here is a specimen of an anonymous poem; and anonymous poetry is an invention peculiarly Teutonic. It was written before the twelfth century; its language is strangely simple, and sometimes uncouth. But there is truth in it; and it is truth after all, and not fiction, that is the secret of all poetry:—
“It has pained me in the heart,
Full many a time,
That I yearned after that
Which I may not have,
Nor ever shall win.
It is very grievous.
I do not mean gold or silver;
It is more like a human heart.