The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory Part 13

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 quant.i.ty, 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 a.s.similate the things of manhood. That accent modified English prosody n.o.body 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.

[Sidenote: _And final perversities thereof._]

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 cla.s.sical prosody to a sort of _praemunire_, 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 indors.e.m.e.nt of "gross fault" on some of the finest pa.s.sages 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 anapaest 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.

[Footnote 104: His instance is Burns's--

"Like a rogue | for for | gerie."

It is a pity he did not reinforce it with many of the finest lines in _The Ancient Mariner_.]

CHAPTER VI.

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 WANDERaeRE' AND 'IWEIN.' LYRICS. THE "BOOKLETS." 'DER ARME HEINRICH.' WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH. 't.i.tUREL.' '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 unsurpa.s.sed literary interest of this present period is that almost all the princ.i.p.al 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 va.s.sal 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 _Konig 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 princ.i.p.al 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 authors.h.i.+p 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 authors.h.i.+p 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 h.o.a.rd 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 a.s.sistance 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 Poetic.u.m 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 t.i.tle 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 h.o.a.rd, 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 pa.s.sages and phrases; the story of Sigurd and Brynhild has a pa.s.sion 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 Sinfiotli, 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 mediaeval 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 _Laxdaela_, 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 sh.o.r.es 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--was.h.i.+ng clothes by the sea-sh.o.r.e--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 amba.s.sadors, 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 pa.s.sages. 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 mediaeval subjects of Solomon and Marcolf, St Brandan, &c., are often cla.s.sed, but somewhat wrongly, as they belong to a different school. Properly of the group are _Konig 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. _Konig 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 a.s.sonance. 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_.