"PARSIFAL" AND A GREAT LITERARY CENTURY.

D

BY JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., PH.D.

ARSIFAL" is the watchword of the hour, and every one is interested in the intimate details of Wagner's great musical creation and its rendition. Of the great poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, however, who first put the Graal Legend in a worthy setting in the great master-song, entirely too little has been heard. It is wonderful to think that an unlettered man, who could neither read nor write, should have composed, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, a poem so full of human sympathy, so thrilling with human aspirations, and so complete an expression of the highest human ideals, that seven centuries after his work was accomplished men still find in it the preeminent satisfaction of all that they ask of great poetry.

Very few people realize, however, that the great Meistersinger Wolfram, far from being a solitary poetic personality in the midst of a period arid in literary growth, was only one of a series of supreme poets-makers or creators in the true sense of the Greek original-whose work has had more influence on mankind, with the exception, of course, of the great Greek poets, than those of any other literary period in history. The poem of the Cid in Spain; the Arthur Legends in Britain; the legendary epic poetry of North France, and the Trouvères of Picardy; the Master songs of South Germany, with the Minnesingers of the time; the Troubadours of South France, and finally Dante, who, it will be remembered, was thirty-five before the thirteenth century closed, have an interest not only as the beginnings, but what may very properly be called the sublime origins of our modern literature.

It will not be so surprising to realize this, if we only recall what this period represents in art accomplishment and æsthetic endeavor in other lines. The great Gothic cathedrals are the most glorious and enduring monuments of the art genius of an epoch that have ever been raised. Every minutest detail of

attention, and with a sublime devotion and faith that were only equalled by the wonderful success that greeted the efforts of the artists of the time in finding adequate expression for their artistic ideals in every department of art. The stained glass, the statuary, the wood and iron work, the lines of interior and exterior decoration, their beautiful illuminated mass and office books, their vestments with the finest needlework that was ever made, their wonderful bells, and, finally, the Gregorian Chant, which was brought to its perfection for them, and the partmusic, invented so as to fill them with harmony, are all examples of human artistic effort reaching as near perfection as possible in its striving after the externalization of its ideas. It would be impossible to conceive that men who in every other mode of æsthetics reached so high a plane of excellence should fail to have made a literature worthy of their generations. There has never been any presumption that they were without interest in literature, in the widest sense of the word at least, since it is to this same century that we owe the rise of the great universities of Europe.

Until recent years, however, there has been almost universal neglect of the precious literary treasures that come to us from this period. The veil is lifting, however, and critical authorities all over the world are pointing out the value of the sublime poetry of the time. Naïve it is of course, and crude in its expression at times, since it comes at a period when the great modern languages are not as yet fully developed, but are only in course of formation from the older Latin or Teutonic tongues. Now that popular notice has been directed particularly to Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of "Percival" or "Parsifal," it seems worth while to call attention to the work of some of his contemporaries, and his immediate predecessors and successors in that wonderful literary era of the thirteenth century.

Wolfram von Eschenbach was, as Scherer says in his History of German Literature, the greatest German poet of the Middle Ages, and was also recognized as such. "No lay mouth ever spake better," said a poet of the time, who gazed with wonder on the rising star of Wolfram von Eschenbach's genius, and succeeding centuries concurred in his judgment. It is an interesting, and

his age that he was considered only inferior to the Bible and to the great religious teachers.

The poet is a great contradiction of certain modern notions as to the necessity for book-learning in properly educating, that is, in drawing out the intellectual faculties. He seems to have been almost entirely without even the elements of literary culture. According to tradition, he could neither read nor write. He had many things read to him, and occasionally he seems to have had recourse to the labor-saving device of the modern writer, dictation. He was, however, a man of an immense power of memory, and, like the popular poets of the ages before culture was common, could easily carry many thousands of verses in his memory. Scherer remarks, in his History of German Literature, that his very illiterateness gave him an incomparable force and independence, for reading always lays certain shackles on the imagination.

The most distinguished of Wolfram's German contemporaries was Hartmann von Aue. He seems to have been both valiant knight and charming poet. One of the old chronicles says of him that he was a knight so learned that he could read in books whatever he found written there. It is from Hartmann's "Der Arme Heinrich" (Poor Henry) that Longfellow has taken the beautiful story of love and sacrifice which he has embodied in his "Golden Legend." No more sympathetically human story of human faults, of trials that lead to higher things, and of the final triumph of what is best in man's nature under the influence of a kindly feminine spirit, has ever been written.

It is to Hartmann that we owe one of the most beautiful and most complete expressions of woman's place as the true helpmeet of man in everything that he does, even the distant fighting, in which apparently she has no part:

Glory be unto her whose word

Sends her dear lord to bitter fight;
Although he conquer by his sword,

She to the praise has equal right;

He with his sword in battle, she at home with prayer,
Both win the victory, and both the glory share."

To another, perhaps to others, of the Meistersingers-for like

Nibelungen Lied, which Professor Lachmann, the distinguished German critic, has traced to its origin. According to him, scarcely a stanza of that poem as we have it now is older than 1190, and the latest additions to it were made some time before the end of the first quarter of the thirteenth century. This wonderful poem, which contains in itself some of the most powerful poetic elements, and though cast in a form that smacks of the crudity of its age, lives on without the influence of the more developed literary qualities it might be supposed to need for immortality. Its power, in spite of the lack of nicety of expression, is the best index of the wonderful genius of the generation to which we owe it. It was, however, only another sign of the necessity for expression that came over the poets of that generation, the inevitableness of great thoughts; and as we have seen, all over Germany similar forces were at work finding symbols for like irrepressible feelings out of the necessity of the time spirit's influence that was breathing so irresistibly where it would.

Just after the Meistersingers came the Minnesingers in Germany. This lyrical poetry marks an epoch in rhythm and versification, as well as in the expression of beautiful thoughts by beautiful sounds. Such names as that of Walther von der Vogelweide, of Heinrich von Veldeke and Ekkehard, are no longer so unknown unknown as they used to be. Walther's famous definition of Minne, or love, is as enduring as the pretty verses in which it was written:

"The bliss of two hearts, if both share equally,

Then Minne is there;

One heart alone cannot hold her."

It is to Walther, too, that we owe the significant expression: "Woman is woman's fairest name, and far above that of lady. Many a lady is far from being a woman, but a woman is always womanly."

In Britain the Arthur Legends reached an acme of sublime poetic expression in the Lancelot story, invented just at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries. It is not certain to whom we owe the conception of Lancelot as a hero. His probable creator was Walter Map, or Mapes, who wrote the story originally in Latin. How great this invention

modern critic, Mr. George Saintsbury, who, in his volume on the literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one of the volumes of the series "Periods of European Literature," says: "Perhaps the great artistic stroke in the whole Legend, and one of the greatest in all literature, is the concoction of a hero who should be not only

'Like Paris handsome, and like Hector brave,'

but more heroic than Paris and more interesting than Hector, -not only a 'greatest knight,' but at once the lover of his queen and the champion who should himself all but achieve, and in the person of his son actually achieve, the sacred adventure of the Holy Graal. If, as there seems no valid reason to disbelieve, the hitting upon this idea, and the invention or adoption of Lancelot to carry it out, be the work of Walter Mapes, then Walter Mapes is one of the great novelists of the world, and one of the greatest of them. If it was some unknown person (it could hardly be Chrestien de Troyes, for in Chrestien's form the Graal interest belongs to Percevale, not to Lancelot or Galahad), then the same compliment must be paid to that person unknown. Meanwhile the conception and execution of Lancelot, to whomsoever they may be due, are things most happy. Entirely free from the faultlessness which is the curse of the classical hero; his unequalled valor not seldom rewarded only by reverses; his merits redeemed from mawkishness by his one great fault, yet including all virtues that are themselves most amiable, and deformed by no vice that is actually loathsome; the soul of goodness in him always warring with his human frailty,-Sir Lancelot fully deserves the noble funeral eulogy pronounced over his grave, and felt by all the elect to be, in both senses, one of the first of all extant pieces of perfect English prose."

The poets of France at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries were scarcely less great than their German and English contemporaries, though by a curious fate, which they owe to the neglect of their fellowcountrymen, they have been until recent years much less known. It seems easy to trace the national characteristics of France and Germany in the poetry of the two races even at that time. Troubadour and trouvère poetry is more trivial in