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.
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]
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.
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."
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.
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.