m into the very same category as
the poems of other men; but to us, with our experience of so many
different forms of narrative, it must be evident that "Tristan und
Isolde" is a new departure, inasmuch as it is not the story of deeds and
the people who did them, like the true epic from Homer to the
Nibelungen; nor the story of people and the adventures which happened to
them, like all romance poetry from "Palemon and Arcite," to the "Orlando
Furioso;" but, on the contrary, the story of the psychological
relations, the gradual metamorphosis of soul by soul, between two
persons. The long introductory story of Tristram's youth must not
mislead us, nor all the minute narrations of the killing of dragons and
the drinking of love philters: Gottfried, we must remember, was
certainly no deliberate innovator, and these thing's are the mere
inevitable externalities of mediaeval poetry, preserved with dull slavish
care by the re-writer of a well-known tale, but enclosing in reality
something essentially and startlingly modern: the history of a passion
and of the spiritual changes which it brings about in those who are its
victims.

To meet again this purely psychological interest we must skip the whole
rest of the Middle Ages, nay, skip even the great period of dramatic
literature, not stopping till we come to the end of the seventeenth and
beginning of the eighteenth century, to the "Princesse de Cleves," to
"Clarissa Harlowe," nay, really, to "The Nouvelle Heloise." For even in
Shakespeare there is always interest and importance in the action and
reaction of subsidiary characters, in the event, in the accidental;
there is intrigue, chance, misunderstanding, fate--active agencies of
which Othello and Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo, are helpless victims;
there is, even in this psychological English drama of the Elizabethans,
fate in the shape of Iago, in the shape of the Ghost, in the shape of
the brothers of Webster's duchess; fate in the shape of a ring, a
letter, a drug, but fate always. And in this "Tristan und Isolde" of
Gottfried von Strassburg is there not fate also in the love potion
intended for King Mark, and given by the mistake of Brangwaine to Mark's
bride and his nephew? To this objection, which will naturally occur to
any reader who is not acquainted with the poem of Gottfried, I simply
answer, there is not. The love potion there is, but it does not play the
same part as do, for instance, the drugs of Friar Laurence a