For some hundred years past it has been common to lay great stress upon the importance of national characteristics in art. This has been very natural, for they represent one main aspect and justification of the revolt against the conception of the one permanent and immutable standard of perfection of the Neo-classicists of the Renaissance. Lessing and Herder, who were the critical protagonists of the new world, had indeed a knowledge and admiration of ancient art which was probably superior to that of the classicists, but they refused to admit that art was bound to follow the forms of antiquity, and maintained rather that its forms would necessarily change with the changing conditions of the world, and with the varying characteristics of different nationalities or races.
From their time down to our own, then, this conception of art, as being coloured or affected strongly and continually by nationality, has become almost a commonplace of criticism, and it will not be denied that there is real importance in the conception. For though nothing is really art which is not distinctive and personal and unique, yet just so far as the personality of the artist is conditioned by his nationality, so far also will his artistic work reflect the characteristics of his nation or country. And yet, while this is true, it really needs very little consideration to see that when we consider a great work of art, we are very little concerned with the question of the nationality of the artist, but with something which is deeper and larger than his nationality. The great artist no doubt represents life under the forms or terms of his concrete experience, but it is life and the world itself which he represents. He is not greatly concerned with the merely superficial or passing aspects of human nature and the world, but with that which is essential and continuing under these terms.
It may indeed be urged that there is some real and fundamental difference between the art of the East and that of the West, but as we have come to know eastern art better, we have become more doubtful even of this, and are rather impressed with the unity of the artistic expression even of East and West. I am far from wishing to say that nationality or race has no significance in art, but I think that we have been in danger of greatly exaggerating its importance. I am at least certain that we have very constantly made too much of the supposed differences in the literature and art of the different European countries, and that we must make clear to ourselves that European art and literature are really one.
It is not unimportant to observe this at the present time, to consider whether literature and art are dividing or uniting forces. As far as we can understand, what indeed seems a little unintelligible, the Germans desire to impress upon Europe their culture or civilization, an attempt as absurd as it would be impossible, for German culture is, after all, only a part of the great European civilization, and the part cannot take the place of the whole. But on the other hand it is not less important for us to understand that what we desire to do is not to destroy those elements which Germany contributes to European civilization, but only that they should take their natural and appropriate place in that greater unity which is enriched and enlarged by the contribution of every separate national society. European art is one; that is, the common characteristics are far more important than the national differences. And further, we often take to be national, characteristics which happen to show themselves at one time in one place, while they may have existed at another time in another place. The history of European art is in a great measure the history of successive influences or movements which were for the most part common to all Europe, but which did not always exactly synchronize in the different European countries.
So far as there is such a thing as nationalism in literature it is wholly modern, while in mediaeval literature and art there is hardly anything of it. This may seem strange to those who imagine that it is only the railway and the steamship which have brought the world together, but the truth is that the movement of ideas and fashions was probably at least as rapid in the Middle Ages as it is to-day. However this may be, the fact is, I think, clear, that when we come to examine mediaeval literature we find that it is practically homogeneous, that whether we look at it in England or France, in Germany or in Scandinavia, it has practically the same qualities. I do not speak of Italy yet, for Italian literature is the latest-born of the great European literatures, it has not at least come down to us in any forms earlier than those of the thirteenth century.
Mediaeval literature is known to us primarily under two forms, the heroic epic and the romance, and it is to these that we must first turn our attention. We know the heroic epic in different languages throughout a period which extends roughly from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. The earliest example is the English Beowulf; among the latest are the German Nibelungenlied and some of the French Chansons de Geste, which belong to the end of the twelfth century. This epic literature is not least interesting to us because it has, as far as we can judge, no trace of that great classical influence of which you have already heard, and which plays so great a part in the later developments of European literature. Now what is the epic? Its materials are the stories of northern mythology, the traditions of the great migrations which overthrew the Roman empire in the west, and the legends which grew up round the name of Charles the Great. They are stories of the gods and demigods, of the Burgundian and the Hun, of the English people possibly while still settled on the Baltic coasts, of the conflicts of the Frank and the Saracen, of the earliest settlers in Iceland; and they vary in their temper and their tone.
But they all represent the sense of the glory and splendour of the great fighting man, of the stout heart, which rises with rising danger and is never so great or so splendid as when it faces overwhelming odds and defies the inexorable fates. The epic poet is so possessed by this sense of the greatness of human nature that it does not matter much even whether the man is wrong or perverse: he loves the obstinacy of Roland, who will not, till too late, sound his horn to call Charlemagne and his armies, but prefers to face the enemy, and if need be to die, by himself, rather than to ask for help; he is filled with the sense of the magnificence of the stark figure of Hagen, who had indeed treacherously murdered the great Siegfried, but whose heart is so high and his hand so heavy, that when he is overpowered, and Chriemhilda at last avenges upon him the murder of her husband, the old knight standing by kills Chriemhilda herself—it was not meet that so great a fighter should be slain by a woman. These are the men of the epics.
And beside them stand the figures of women great and gracious, women for whose love men die and perish, but who themselves also can hate and love passionately and fiercely. It has sometimes been said by those who only know the epics in one or other of the various languages, that women and the love of women have no place in the epic, but belong to the romance, but this is a mistake. In the mediaeval epic there is little talk about emotion, but in the Nibelungenlied and in some of the Icelandic sagas the woman is, like Helen in the Homeric epic, the motive and source of all the action.
The epic is the story of great and heroic figures, abstracted in that sense from the common or ordinary circumstances of life, but the background of the action is always realistic and even detailed in its realism, so that, just as again in the Homeric poems, we can frequently reconstruct the life and manners of the time to which the poems belong from that which they tell us. And it is impossible to say that there is any really national difference between the epics as we find them in different languages; they are indeed the expression of the temperament and personality of the great artists who produced them, and they are each unique and individual in proportion to the greatness of their authors, but in their general characteristics they are the same.