nd his
intercepted letter. Suppose the friar's narcotic to have been less
enduring in its action, or his message to have reached in safety, why
then Juliet would have been awake instead of asleep, or Romeo would not
have supposed her to be dead, and instead of the suicide of the two
lovers, we should have had the successful carying off of Juliet by
Romeo. Not so with Gottfried. The philter is there, and a great deal is
talked about it; but it is merely one of the old, threadbare trappings
of the original story, which he has been too lazy to suppress; it is
merely, for the reader, the allegorical signal for an outburst of
passion which all our subsequent knowledge of Tristram and Yseult shows
us to be absolutely inevitable. In Gottfried's poem, the drinking of the
potion signifies merely that all the rambling, mediaeval prelude, not to
be distinguished from the stories of "Morte d'Arthur," and of half the
romances of the Middle Ages, has come to a close and may be forgotten;
and that the real work of the great poet, the real, matchless tragedy of
the four actors--Tristram, Yseult, Mark, and Brangwaine--has begun.

Yet if we seek again to account to ourselves for this astonishing
impression of modernness which we receive from Gottfried's poem, we
recognize that it is due to something far more important than the mere
precocious psychological interest; nay, rather, that this psychological
interest is itself dependent upon the fact which makes "Tristan und
Isolde," so modern to our feelings. This fact is simply that the poem of
Gottfried is the earliest, and yet perhaps almost the completest,
example of a literary anomaly which Antiquity, for all its abominations,
did not know: the glorification of fidelity in adultery, the
glorification of excellence within the compass of guilt. Older times
--more distant from our own in spirit, though not necessarily in
years--have presented us with many themes of guilt: the guilt which
exists according to our own moral standard, but not according to that of
the narrator, as the magnificently tragic Icelandic incest story of
Sigmund and Signy; the guilt which has come about no one well knows how,
an unfortunate circumstance leaving the sinner virtually stainless, in
his or her own eyes and the eyes of others, like the Homeric Helen; the
heroic guilt, where the very heroism seems due to the self-sacrifice of
the sinner's innocence, of Judith; the struggling, remorseful guilt,
hopelessly ove