s of the Netherlands and of
Provence, to whom the bluff, matter-of-fact heroism, the simple, gross,
but not illegitimate amours of Carolingian heroes, were more
satisfactory than any mystic quest of the Grail, any refined adultery of
Guenevere or Yseult.

But the inevitable fate of all mediaeval epics awaited this triumphant
Arthurian cycle: the fate of being obliterated by passing from one
nation and civilization to another, long before the existence of any
poetic art adequate to its treatment. Of this I will take as an example
one of the mediaeval poems which has the greatest reputation the
masterpiece (according to most critics, with whom I find it difficult,
in the presence of a poet like Gottfried von Strassburg, to agree) of
probably the most really poetical and earnest school of poetry which the
pre-Dantesque Middle Ages possessed--the "Parzifal" of Wolfram von
Eschenbach.

The paramount impression (I cannot say the strongest, for strong
impressions are incompatible with such work as this) left by the
masterpiece of Wolfram von Eschenbach, is that of the most astonishing
vagueness, fluidity, haziness, vaporousness. In reading it one looks
back to that rudely hewn and extremely obliterated Nibelungenlied, as to
something quite astonishingly clear, detailed and strongly marked as to
something distinctly artistic. Indeed by the side of "Parzifal"
everything seems artistic; Hartmann von Aue reads like Chaucer,
"Aucassin et Nicolette" is as living as "Cymbeline," "Chevy Chase" seems
as good as the battles of Homer. It is not a narrative, but a vague
mooning; a knight illiterate, not merely like his fellow minnesingers,
in the way of reading and writing, but in the sense of complete absence
of all habit of literary form; extremely noble and pure of mind, chaste,
gentle, with a funny, puzzled sense of humour, reminding one distantly
of Jean Paul in his drowsy moments; a hanger-on of courts, but perfectly
simple-hearted and childlike; very poor and easily pleased: such is, for
good and for bad, Herr Wolfram von Eschenbach, the only real personality
in his poem. And he narrates, in a mooning, digressive, good-natured,
drowsy tone, with only a rare awaking of interest, a story which he has
heard from some one else, and that some one else from a series of other
some one elses (Chrestien de Troyes, a legendary Provencal Chiot or
Guyot, perhaps even the original Welsh bard); all muddled, monotonous,
and droning; events and