The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory Part 15

_Willehalm_, on the other hand, is not only in form but in substance a following of the French, and of no less a French poem than the _Battle of Aliscans_, which has been so fully dealt with above. It is interesting to compare advocates of the two, and see how German critics usually extol the improvements made by the German poet, while the French sneer at his preachments and waterings-down. But we need say nothing more than that if Wolfram's fame rested on _Willehalm_, the notice of him here would probably not go beyond a couple of lines.

[Sidenote: Parzival.]

_Parzival_, however, is a very different matter. It has of late years received advent.i.tious note from the fact of its selection by Wagner as a libretto; but it did not need this, and it was the admiration of every fit reader long before the opera appeared. The Percevale story, it may be remembered, lies somewhat outside of the main Arthurian legend, which, however, had hardly taken full form when Wolfram wrote.

It has been strongly fought for by the Celticists as traceable originally to the Welsh legend of Peredur; but it is to be observed that neither in this form nor in the English version (which figures among the Thornton Romances) does the Graal make any figure. In the huge poem, made huger by continuators, of Chrestien de Troyes, Percival becomes a Graal-seeker; and on the whole it would appear that, as observed before, he in point of time antic.i.p.ates Galahad and the story which works the Graal thoroughly into the main Arthurian tale. According to Wolfram (but this is a romantic commonplace), Chrestien was culpably remiss in telling the story, and his deficiencies had to be made up by a certain Provencal named Kyot.

Unfortunately there are no traces elsewhere of any such person, or of any version, in Provencal or otherwise, between Chrestien's and Wolfram's. The two, however, stand far enough apart to have admitted of more than one intermediary; or rather no number of intermediaries could really have bridged the chasm, which is one of spirit rather than of matter. In _Percevale le Gallois_, though the Graal exists, and though the adventures are rather more on the outside of the strictly Arthurian cycle than usual, we are still in close relations with that cycle, and the general tone and handling are similar (except in so far as Chrestien is a better _trouvere_ than most) to those of fifty other poems. In _Parzival_ we are translated into another country altogether. Arthur appears but seldom, and though the link with the Round Table is maintained by the appearances of Gawain, who as often, though not always, plays to Percevale the part of light to serious hero, here almost only, and here not always, are we in among "kenned folk." The Graal mountain, Montsalvatsch, is even more in fairyland than the "enchanted towers of Carbonek"; the magician Klingschor is a more shadowy person far than Merlin.

"Cundrie la Sorziere Diu unsueze und doch diu fiere"

is a much more weird personage than Morgane or Nimue, though she may also be more "unsweet." Part of this unfamiliar effect is no doubt due to Wolfram's singular fancy for mutilating and torturing his French names, to his admixture of new characters and adventures, and especially to the almost entirely new genealogy which he introduces.

In the pedigree, containing nearly seventy names, which will be found at the end of Bartsch's edition, not a t.i.the will be familiar to the reader of the English and French romances; and that reader will generally find those whom he does know provided with new fathers and mothers, daughters and wives.

But these would be very small matters if it were not for other differences, not of administration but of spirit. There may have been something too much of the attempt to credit Wolfram with anti-dogmatic views, and with a certain Protestant preference of simple repentance and amendment to the performance of stated rites and penances. What is unmistakable is the way in which he lifts the story, now by phrase, now by verse effect, now by the indefinable magic of sheer poetic handling, out of ordinary ways into ways that are not ordinary. There may perhaps be allowed to be a certain want of "architectonic" in him.

He has not made of Parzival and Condwiramurs, of Gawain and Orgeluse, anything like the complete drama which we find (brought out by the genius of Malory, but existing before) in the French-English Arthurian legend. But any one who knows the origins of that legend from _Erec et enide_ to _Durmart le Gallois_, and from the _Chevalier au Lyon_ to the _Chevalier as Deux Espees_, must recognise in him something higher and larger than can be found in any of them, as well as something more human, if even in the best sense more fairy-tale like, than the earlier and more Western legends of the Graal as we have them in _Merlin_ and the other French books. Here again, not so much for the form as for the spirit, we find ourselves driven to the word "great"--a great word, and one not to be misused as it so often is.

[Sidenote: _Walther von der Vogelweide._]

Yet it may be applied in a different sense, though without hesitation, to our fourth selected name, Walther von der Vogelweide,[120] a name in itself so agreeable that one really has to take care lest it raise an undue prejudice in his favour. Perhaps a part of his greatness belongs to him as the chief representative of a cla.s.s, not, as in Wolfram's case, because of individual merit,--a part also to his excellence of form, which is a claim always regarded with doubt and dislike by some, though not all. It is nearly a quarter of a century since the present writer first possessed himself of and first read the delectable volume in which Franz Pfeiffer opened his series of German Cla.s.sics of the Middle Ages with this singer; and every subsequent reading, in whole or in part, has only increased his attraction.

There are some writers--not many--who seem to defy criticism by a sort of native charm, and of these Walther is one. If we listen to some grave persons, it is a childish thing to write a poem, as he does his second _Lied_, in stanzas every one of which is mono-rhymed on a different vowel. But as one reads

"Diu werlt was gelf, rot unde bla,"[121]

one only prays for more such childishness. Is there a better song of May and maidens than

"So diu bluomen uz dem grase dringent"?

where the very phrase is romance and nature itself, and could never be indulged in by a "cla.s.sical" poet, who would say (very justly), "flowers grow in beds, not gra.s.s; and if in the latter, they ought to be promptly mown and rolled down." How intoxicating, after deserts of iambs, is the dactylic swell of

"Wol mich der stunde, daz ich sie erkande"!

how endearing the drooping cadence of

"Bin ich dir unmaere Des enweiz ich niht; ich minne dich"!

how small the change which makes a jewel out of a commonplace in

"Si hat ein _kussen_ daz ist rot"!

[Footnote 120: Ed. Bartsch. 4th ed. Leipzig, 1873.]

[Footnote 121:

"Diu werlt was gelf, rot unde bla, gruen, in dem walde und anderswa kleine vogele sungen da.

nu schriet aber den nebelkra.

pfligt s'iht ander varwe? ja, s'ist worden bleich und ubergra: des rimpfet sich vil manic bra."

Similar stanzas in _e_, _i_, _o_, _u_ follow in order.]

But to go through the nearly two hundred pieces of Walther's lyric would be here impossible. His _Leich_, his only example of that elaborate kind, the most complicated of the early German lyrical forms, is not perhaps his happiest effort; and his _Spruche_, a name given to short lyrical pieces in which the Minnesingers particularly delighted, and which correspond pretty nearly, though not exactly, to the older sense of "epigram," seldom, though sometimes, possess the charm of the _Lieder_ themselves. But these _Lieder_ are, for probable freedom from indebtedness and intrinsic exquisiteness of phrase and rhythm, unsurpa.s.sed, perhaps unequalled. To compare Walther to Petrarch, and to talk of the one being superior or inferior to the other, is to betray hopeless insensibility to the very rudiments of criticism. They are absolutely different,--the one the embodiment of stately form and laboured intellectual effort--of the Cla.s.sical spirit; the other the mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate, all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the very inseparable garment of Romance. Some may like one better, others the other; the more fortunate may enjoy both. But the greatest of all gulfs is the gulf fixed between the Cla.s.sical and the Romantic; and few there are, it seems, who can cross it.

[Sidenote: _Personality of the poets._]

Perhaps something may be expected as to the personality of these poets, a matter which has had too great a place a.s.signed to it in literary history. Luckily, unless he delights in unbridled guessing, the historian of mediaeval literature is better ent.i.tled to abstain from it than any other. But something may perhaps be said of the men whose work has just been discussed, for there are not uninteresting shades of difference between them. In Germany, as in France, the _trouvere-jongleur_ cla.s.s existed; the greater part of the poetry of the twelfth century, including the so-called small epics, _Konig Rother_ and the rest, is attributed to them, and they were the objects of a good deal of patronage from the innumerable n.o.bles, small and great, of the Empire. On the other hand, though some men of consequence were poets, the proportion of these is, on the whole, considerably less than in France proper or in Provence. The German n.o.ble was not so much literary as a patron of literature, like that Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia, whose court saw the fabulous or semi-fabulous "War of the Wartburg," with Wolfram von Eschenbach and Heinrich von Ofterdingen as chief champions. Indeed this court was the main resort of German poets and minstrels till Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in the next generation proved herself a rather "sair sanct"

for literature, which has since returned her good for evil.

To return to our four selected poets. Gottfried is supposed to have been neither n.o.ble, nor even directly attached to a n.o.ble household, nor a professional minstrel, but a burgher of the town which gives him his name--indeed a caution is necessary to the effect that the _von_ of these early designations, like the _de_ of their French originals, is by no means, as a rule, a sign of n.o.bility. Hartmann von Aue, though rather attached to than a member of the n.o.ble family of the same name from which he has taken the hero of _Der Arme Heinrich_, seems to have been admitted to knightly society, was a crusader, and appears to have been of somewhat higher rank than Gottfried, whom, however, he resembled in this point, that both were evidently men of considerable education. We rise again in status, though probably not in wealth, and certainly not in education, when we come to Wolfram von Eschenbach. He was of a family of Northern Bavaria or Middle Franconia; he bore (for there are diversities on this heraldic point) two axe-blades argent on a field gules, or a bunch of five flowers argent springing from a water-bouget gules; and he is said by witnesses in 1608 to have been described on his tombstone as a knight.

But he was certainly poor, had not received much education, and he was attached in the usual guest-dependant fas.h.i.+on of the time to the Margrave of Vohburg (whose wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria, received his poetical declarations) and to Hermann of Thuringia. He was a married man, and had a daughter.

Lastly, Walther von der Vogelweide appears to have been actually a "working poet," as we may say--a _trouvere_, who sang his own poems as he wandered about, and whose surname was purely a decorative one. He lived, no doubt, by gifts; indeed, the historians are proud to record that a bishop gave him a fur coat precisely on the 12th of November 1203. He was probably born in Austria, lived at Vienna with Duke Frederic of Babenberg for some time, and held poetical offices in the households of several other princes, including the Emperor Frederick II., who gave him an estate at last. It should be said that there are those who insist that he also was of knightly position, and was Vogelweide of that ilk, inasmuch as we find him called "herr," the supposed mark of distinction of a gentleman at the time. Such questions are of importance in their general bearing on the question of literature at given dates, not in respect of individual persons. It must be evident that no word which, like "herr," is susceptible of general as well as technical meanings, can be absolutely decisive in such a case, unless we find it in formal doc.u.ments. Also, after Frederick's gift Walther would have been ent.i.tled to it, though he was not before. At any rate, the entirely wandering life, and the constant relations.h.i.+p to different protectors, which are in fact the only things we know about him, are more in accordance with the notion of a professional minstrel than with that of a man who, like Wolfram, even if he had no estate and was not independent of patronage, yet had a settled home of his own, and was buried where he was born.

[Sidenote: _The Minnesingers generally._]

The introduction of what may be called a representative system into literary history has been here rendered necessary by the fact that the school-resemblance so common in mediaeval writers is nowhere more common than among the Minnesingers,[122] and that the latter are extraordinarily numerous, if not also extraordinarily monotonous. One famous collection contains specimens of 160 poets, and even this is not likely to include the whole of those who composed poetry of the kind before Minnesong changed (somewhere in the thirteenth century or at the beginning of the fourteenth, but at times and in manners which cannot be very precisely fixed) into Meistersong. The chief lyric poets before Walther were Heinrich von Veldeke, his contemporary and namesake Heinrich von Morungen, and Reinmar von Hagenau, whom Gottfried selects as Walther's immediate predecessor in "nightingales.h.i.+p": the chief later ones, Neidhart von Regenthal, famous for dance-songs; Tannhauser, whose actual work, however, is of a mostly burlesque character, as different as possible from, and perhaps giving rise by very contrast to, the beautiful and terrible legend which connects his name with the Venus-berg (though Heine has managed in his version to combine the two elements); Ulrich von Lichtenstein, half an apostle, half a caricaturist of _Frauendienst_ on the Provencal model; and, finally, Frauenlob or Heinrich von Meissen, who wrote at the end of our period and the beginning of the next for nearly fifty years, and may be said to be the link between Minnesong and Meistersong.

[Footnote 122: The standard edition or _corpus_ of their work is that of Von der Hagen, in three large vols. Leipzig, 1838.]

So also in the other departments of poetry, harbingers, contemporaries, and continuators, some of whom have been mentioned, most of whom it would be impossible to mention, group round the greater masters, and as in France, so here, the departments themselves branch out in an almost bewildering manner. Germany, as may be supposed, had its full share of that "poetry of information" which const.i.tutes so large a part of mediaeval verse, though here even more than elsewhere such verse is rarely, except by courtesy, poetry.

Families of later handlings, both of the folk epic and the literary romances, exist, such as the _Rosengarten_, the _h.o.r.n.y Siegfried_, and the story of Wolfdietrich in the one cla.s.s; _Wigalois_ and _Wigamur_, and a whole menagerie of poems deriving from the _Chevalier au Lyon_, on the other. With the general growth, half epidemic, half directly borrowed from France, of abstraction and allegory (_vide_ next chapter), Satire made its way, and historians generally dwell on the "Frau Welt" of Konrad von Wurzburg in the middle of the thirteenth century, in which Wirent von Grafenburg (a well-known poet among the literary school, the author of _Wigalois_) is brought face to face with an incarnation of the World and its vanity. Volumes on volumes of moral poetry date from the thirteenth century, and culminate in the somewhat well-known _Renner_[123] of Hugo von Trimberg, dating from the very last year of our period: perhaps the most noteworthy is the _Bescheidenheit_ of Freidank, a crusader _trouvere_ who accompanied Frederick II. to the East. But in all this Germany is only following the general habit of the age, and to a great extent copying directly.

Even in those greater writers who have been here noticed there is, as we have seen, not a little imitation; but the national and individual peculiarities more than excuse this. The national epics, with the _Nibelungenlied_ at their head, the Arthurian stories transformed, of which in different ways _Tristan_ and _Parzival_, but especially the latter, are the chief, and the Minnesong,--these are the great contributions of Germany during the period, and they are great indeed.

[Footnote 123: On this see the last pa.s.sage, except the conclusion on _Reynard the Fox_, of Carlyle's Essay on "Early German Literature"

noted above. Of the great romances, as distinguished from the _Nibelungen_, Carlyle did not know much, and he was not quite in sympathy either with their writers or with the Minnesingers proper.

But the life-philosopher of _Reynard_ and the _Renner_ attracted him.]

CHAPTER VII.

THE 'FOX,' THE 'ROSE,' AND THE MINOR CONTRIBUTIONS OF FRANCE.

THE PREDOMINANCE OF FRANCE. THE RISE OF ALLEGORY. LYRIC. THE "ROMANCE" AND THE "PASTOURELLE." THE "FABLIAUX." THEIR ORIGIN. THEIR LICENCE. THEIR WIT. DEFINITION AND SUBJECTS.

EFFECT OF THE "FABLIAUX" ON LANGUAGE. AND ON NARRATIVE.

CONDITIONS OF "FABLIAU"-WRITING. THE APPEARANCE OF IRONY.

FABLES PROPER. 'REYNARD THE FOX.' ORDER OF TEXTS. PLACE OF ORIGIN. THE FRENCH FORM. ITS COMPLICATIONS. UNITY OF SPIRIT.

THE RISE OF ALLEGORY. THE SATIRE OF 'RENART.' THE FOX HIMSELF. HIS CIRCLE. THE BURIAL OF RENART. THE 'ROMANCE OF THE ROSE.' WILLIAM OF LORRIS AND JEAN DE MEUNG. THE FIRST PART. ITS CAPITAL VALUE. THE ROSE-GARDEN. "DANGER."

"REASON." "SHAME" AND "SCANDAL." THE LATER POEM.

"FALSE-SEEMING." CONTRAST OF THE PARTS. VALUE OF BOTH, AND CHARM OF THE FIRST. MARIE DE FRANCE AND RUTEBOEUF. DRAMA.

ADAM DE LA HALLE. "ROBIN ET MARION." THE "JEU DE LA FEUILLIE." COMPARISON OF THEM. EARLY FRENCH PROSE. LAWS AND SERMONS. VILLEHARDOUIN. WILLIAM OF TYRE. JOINVILLE. FICTION.

'AUCa.s.sIN ET NICOLETTE.'

[Sidenote: _The predominance of France._]

The contributions of France to European literature mentioned in the three chapters (II.-IV.) which deal with the three main sections of Romance, great as we have seen them to be, by no means exhausted the debt which literature owes to her during this period. It is indeed not a little curious that the productions of this time, long almost totally ignored in France itself, and even now rather grudgingly acknowledged there, are the only periodic set of productions that justify the claim, so often advanced by Frenchmen, that their country is at the head of the literary development of Europe. It was not so in the fourteenth century, when not only Chaucer in England, but Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio in Italy, attained literary heights to which none of their French contemporaries even approached. It was not so in the fifteenth, when France, despite Villon and others, was the very School of Dulness, and even England, with the help of the Scottish poets and Malory, had a slight advantage over her, while she was far outstripped by Italy. It was not so in the sixteenth, when Italy hardly yet fell behind, and Spain and England far outwent her: nor, according to any just estimate, in the seventeenth. In the eighteenth her pale correctness looks faint enough, not merely beside the ma.s.sive strength of England, but beside the gathering force of Germany: and if she is the equal of the best in the nineteenth, it is at the very most a bare equality. But in the twelfth and thirteenth France, if not Paris, was in reality the eye and brain of Europe, the place of origin of almost every literary form, the place of finis.h.i.+ng and polis.h.i.+ng, even for those forms which she did not originate. She not merely taught, she wrought--and wrought consummately. She revived and transformed the fable; perfected, if she did not invent, the beast-epic; brought the short prose tale to an exquisite completeness; enlarged, suppled, chequered, the somewhat stiff and monotonous forms of Provencal lyric into myriad-noted variety; devised the prose-memoir, and left capital examples of it; made attempts at the prose history; ventured upon much and performed no little in the vernacular drama; besides the vast performance, sometimes inspired from elsewhere but never as literature copied, which we have already seen, in her fostering if not mothering of Romance. When a learned and enthusiastic Icelander speaks of his patrimony in letters as "a native literature which, in originality, richness, historical and artistic worth, stands unrivalled in modern Europe," we can admire the patriot but must shake our heads at the critic. For by Dr Vigfusson's own confession the strength of Icelandic literature consists in the sagas, and the sagas are the product of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

At that very time France, besides the _chansons de geste_--as native, as original, as the sagas, and if less rich, far more artistic in form--France has to show the great romances proper, which Iceland herself, like all the world, copied, a lyric of wonderful charm and abundance, the vast comic wealth of the _fabliaux_, and the _Fox_-epic, prose not merely of laws and homilies and rudimentary educational subjects, but of every variety, drama, history, philosophy, allegory, dream.

[Sidenote: _The rise of Allegory._]