But the prosody of the Romance tongues is perfectly simple and intelligible, except in the one crux of the question how it came into being, and what part "popular" poetry played in it. We find it, almost from the first, full-blown: and only minor refinements or improvements are introduced afterwards. With English prosody it is very different.[102] As has been said, the older prosody itself, with the older verse, seems to have to a great extent died out even before the Conquest, and what verse was written in the alliterative measures afterwards was of a feeble and halting kind. The later
alliteration. Even when, as the authors of later volumes of this series will have to show, alliterative verse was taken up with something like a set purpose during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, its character was wholly changed, and though some very good work was written in it, it was practically all literary exercise. It frequently assumed regular stanza-forms, the lines also frequently fell into regular quantitative shapes, such as the heroic, the Alexandrine, and the tetrameter. Above all, the old strict and accurate combination of a limited amount of alliteration, jealously adjusted to words important in sense and rhythm, was exchanged for a profusion of alliterated syllables, often with no direct rhythmical duty to pay, and constantly leading to mere senseless and tasteless jingle, if not to the positive coining of fantastic or improper locutions to get the "artful aid."

Meanwhile the real prosody of English had been elaborated, in the usual blending fashion of the race, by an intricate, yet, as it happens, an easily traceable series of compromises and naturalisations. By the end of the twelfth century, as we have seen, rhyme was creeping in to supersede alliteration, and a regular arrangement of elastic syllabic equivalents or strict syllabic values was taking the place of the irregular accented lengths. It does not appear that the study of the classics had anything directly to do with this: it is practically certain that the influence on the one hand of Latin hymns and the Church services, and on the other of French poetry, had very much.

Rhyme is to the modern European ear so agreeable, if not so indispensable, an ornament of verse, that, once heard, it is sure to creep in, and can only be expelled by deliberate and unnatural crotchet from any but narrative and dramatic poetry. On the other hand, it is almost inevitable that when rhyme is expected, the lines which it tips should be reduced to an equal or at any rate an equivalent length. Otherwise the expectation of the ear—that the final ring should be led up to by regular and equable rhythm—is baulked. If this is not done, as in what we call doggerel rhyme, an effect of grotesque is universally produced, to the ruin of serious poetic effect. With these desiderata present, though unconsciously present, before them, with the Latin hymn-writers and the French poets for models, and with Church music perpetually starting in their memories cadences, iambic or trochaic, dactylic or anapæstic, to which to set their own verse, it is not surprising that English poets should have accompanied the rapid changes of their language itself with parallel rapidity of metrical innovation. Quantity they observed loosely—quantity in modern languages is always loose: but it does not follow that they ignored it altogether.

Those who insist that they did ignore it, and who painfully search for verses of so many "accents," for "sections," for "pauses," and what not, are confronted with difficulties throughout the whole course of English poetry: there is hardly a page of that brilliant, learned, instructive, invaluable piece of wrong-headedness, Dr Guest's English Rhythms, which does not bristle with them. But at no time are these difficulties so great as during our present period, and especially at the close of it. Let any man who has no "prize to fight," no thesis to defend, take any characteristic piece of Anglo-Saxon poetry and "Alison," place them side by side, read them aloud together, scan them carefully with the eye, compare each separately and both together with as many other examples of poetic arrangement as he likes. He must, I think, be hopelessly blinded by prejudice if he does not come to the conclusion that there is a gulf between the systems of which these two poems are examples—that if the first is "accentual," "sectional," and what not, then these same words are exactly not the words which ought to be applied to the second.[103] And he will further see that with "Alison" there is not the slightest difficulty whatever, but that, on the contrary, it is the natural and all but inevitable thing to do to scan the piece according to classical laws, allowing only much more licence of "common" syllables—common in themselves and by position—than in Latin, and rather more than in Greek.

Yet another conclusion may perhaps be risked, and that is that this change of prosody was either directly caused by, or in singular coincidence was associated with, a great enlargement of the range and no slight improvement of the quality of poetry. Anglo-Saxon verse at its best has grandeur, mystery, force, a certain kind of pathos. But it is almost entirely devoid of sweetness, of all the lighter artistic attractions, of power to represent other than religious passion, of adaptability to the varied uses of lyric. All these additional gifts, and in no slight measure, have now been given; and there is surely an almost fanatical hatred of form in the refusal to connect the gain with those changes, in vocabulary first, in prosody secondly, which have been noted. For there is not only the fact, but there is a more than plausible reason for the fact. The alliterative accentual verse of indefinite length is obviously unsuited for all the lighter, and for some of the more serious, purposes of verse. Unless it is at really heroic height (and at this height not even Shakespeare can keep poetry invariably) it must necessarily be flat, awkward, prosaic, heavy, all which qualities are the worst foes of the Muses. The new equipments may not have been indispensable to the poet's soaring—they may not be the greater wings of his song, the mighty pinions that take him beyond Space and Time into Eternity and the Infinite. But they are most admirable talaria, ankle-winglets enabling him to skim and scud, to direct his flight this way and that, to hover as well as to tower, even to run at need as well as to fly.

That a danger was at hand, the danger of too great restriction in the syllabic direction, has been admitted. The greatest poet of the fourteenth century in England—the greatest, for the matter of that, from the beginning till the sixteenth—went some way in this path, and if Chaucer's English followers had been men of genius we might have been sorely trammelled. Fortunately Lydgate and Occleve and Hawes showed the dangers rather than the attractions of strictness, and the contemporary practice of alliterative irregulars kept alive the appetite for liberty. But at this time—at our time—it was restriction, regulation, quantification, metrical arrangement, that English needed; and it received them.

These remarks are of course not presented as a complete account, even in summary, of English, much less of European prosody. They are barely more than the heads of such a summary, or than indications of the line which the inquiry might, and in the author's view should, take. Perhaps they may be worked out—or rather the working out of them may be published—more fully hereafter. But for the present they may possibly be useful as a protest against the "accent" and "stress" theories which have been so common of late years in regard to English poetry, and which, though not capable of being applied in quite the same fashion to the Romance languages, have had their counterparts in attempts to decry the application of classical prosody (which has never been very well understood on the Continent) to modern tongues. No one can speak otherwise than respectfully of Dr Guest, whose book is certainly one of the most patient and ingenious studies of the kind to be found in any literature, and whose erudition, at a time when such erudition needed far greater efforts than now, cannot be too highly praised. But it is a besetting sin or disease of Englishmen in all matters, after pooh-poohing innovation, to go blindly in for it; and I cannot but think that Dr Guest's accentual theory, after being for years mainly neglected, has, for years again, been altogether too greedily swallowed. It is not of course a case necessarily of want of scholarship, or want of ear, for there are few better scholars or poets than Mr Robert Bridges, who, though not a mere Guestite, holds theories of prosody which seem to me even less defensible than Guest's. But it is, I think, a case of rather misguided patriotism, which thinks it necessary to invent an English prosody for English poems.

This is surely a mistake. Allowances in degree, in shade, in local colour, there must of course be in prosody as in other things. The developments, typical and special, of English prosody in the nineteenth century cannot be quite the same as those of Greek two thousand years ago, or of French to-day. But if, as I see not the slightest reason for doubting, prosody is not an artificially acquired art but a natural result of the natural desires, the universal organs of humanity, it is excessively improbable that the prosodic results of nations so nearly allied to each other, and so constantly studying each other's work, as Greeks, Romans, and modern Europeans, should be in any great degree different. If quantity, if syllabic equivalence and so forth, do not display themselves in Anglo-Saxon or in Icelandic, it must be remembered that the poetry of these nations was after all comparatively small, rather isolated, and in the conditions of extremely early development—a childish thing to which there is not the slightest rhyme or reason for straining ourselves to assimilate the things of manhood. That accent modified English prosody nobody need deny; there is no doubt that the very great freedom of equivalence—which makes it, for instance, at least theoretically possible to compose an English heroic line of five tribrachs—and the immense predominance of common syllables in the language, are due in some degree to a continuance of accentual influence.

But to go on from this, as Dr Guest and some of his followers have done, to the subjection of the whole invaluable vocabulary of classical prosody to a sort of præmunire, to hold up the hands in horror at the very name of a tribrach, and exhibit symptoms of catalepsy at the word catalectic—to ransack the dictionary for unnatural words or uses of words like "catch," and "stop," and "pause," where a perfectly clear and perfectly flexible terminology is ready to your hand—this does seem to me in another sense a very childish thing indeed, and one that cannot be too soon put away. It is no exaggeration to say that the extravagances, the unnatural contortions of scansion, the imputations of irregularity and impropriety on the very greatest poets with which Dr Guest's book swarms, must force themselves on any one who studies that book thoroughly and impartially. When theory leads to the magisterial indorsement of "gross fault" on some of the finest passages of Shakespeare and Milton, because they "violate" Dr Guest's privy law of "the final pause"; when we are told that "section 9," as Dr Guest is pleased to call that admirable form of "sixes," the anapæst followed by two iambs,[104] one of the great sources of music in the ballad metre, is "a verse which has very little to recommend it"; when one of Shakespeare's secrets, the majestic full stop before the last word of the line, is black-marked as "opposed to every principle of accentual rhythm," then the thing becomes not so much outrageous as absurd. Prosody respectfully and intelligently attempting to explain how the poets produce their best things is useful and agreeable: when it makes an arbitrary theory beforehand, and dismisses the best things as bad because they do not agree therewith, it becomes a futile nuisance. And I believe that there is no period of our literature which, when studied, will do more to prevent or correct such fatuity than this very period of Early Middle English.

CHAPTER VI.

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.

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.

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.

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, The Volsunga
Saga. 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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.