by a cure as miraculous as was his harm; recovers his fortune, and marries the maiden. A later termination. separates them again; but this is simply the folly and bad taste of a certain, and only a certain, perversion of mediæval sentiment, the crowning instance of which is found in Guy of Warwick. Hartmann himself was no such simpleton; and (with only an infinitesimal change of a famous sentence) we may be sure that as he was a good lover so he made a good end to his story.

Wolfram von

Although German writers may sometimes have mispraised or overpraised their greatest mediæval poet, it is certain that we find in Wolfram von Eschenbach. Eschenbach1 qualities which, in the thousand years between the Fall and the Renaissance of classical literature, can be found to anything like the same extent in only two known writers, the Italian Dante and the Englishman Langland; while if he is immensely Dante's inferior in poetical quality, he has at least one gift, humour, which Dante had not, and is far Langland's superior in variety and in romantic charm. He displays, moreover, a really curious contrast to the poets already mentioned, and to most of the far greater number not mentioned. It is in Wolfram first that we come across, in anything like noticeable measure, that mastery of poetical mysticism which is the pride, and justly the pride, of the German Muse. Gottfried and Hartmann are rather practical folk. Hartmann has at best a pious and Gottfried a profane

1 Complete works. Ed. Lachmann. Berlin, 1838. Parzival und Titurel. 2 vols. Ed. Bartsch. Leipzig, 1870.

fancy; of the higher qualities of imagination there is little or nothing in them; and not much in the vast crowd of the Minnesingers, from the chief "nightingale" Walther downwards. Wolfram, himself a Minnesinger (indeed the term is loosely applied to all the poets of this time, and may be very properly claimed by Gottfried and Hartmann, though the former has left no lyric), has left us few but very remarkable aubades, in which the commonplace of the morning-song, with its disturbance of lovers, is treated in no commonplace way. But his fame rests on the three epics, Parzival, Titurel, and Willehalm. It is practically agreed that Parzival represents the flourishing time, and Willehalm the evening, of his work; there is more critical disagreement about the time of composition of Titurel, which, Titurel. though it was afterwards continued and worked up by another hand, exists only in fragments, and presents a very curious difference of structure as compared both with Parzival (with which in subject it is connected) and with Willehalm. Both these are in octosyllables: Titurel is in a singular and far from felicitous stanza, which stands to that of Kudrun much as the Kudrun stanza does to that of the Nibelungen. Here there are none but double rhymes; and not merely the second half of the fourth, but the second half of the second line "tails out" in the manner formerly described. The consequence is, that while in Kudrun it is, as was remarked, difficult to get any swing on the metre, in Titurel it is simply impossible; and it has been thought without any improbability

that the fragmentary condition of the piece is due to the poet's reasonable discontent with the shackles he had imposed on himself. The substance is good enough, and would have made an interesting chapter in the vast working up of the Percevale story which Wolfram probably had in his mind.

Willehalm.

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 wateringsdown. 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.

Parzival, however, is a very different matter. It has of late years received adventitious note from the fact of its selection by Wagner as a libretto; Parzival. 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 anticipates 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 Provençal named Kyot. Unfortunately there are no traces elsewhere of any such person, or of any version, in Provençal 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 trouvère 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 tithe 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,