rcome by fate and nature, of Phaedra; the dull and dogged
guilt, making the sinner scarce more than a mere physical
stumbling-block for others, of the murderer Hagen in the Nibelungenlied;
and, finally, the perverse guilt, delighting in the consciousness of
itself, of demons like Richard and Iago, of libidinous furies like the
heroines of Tourneur and Marston. The guilt theme of "Tristan und
Isolde" falls into none of these special categories. This theme,
unguessed even by Shakespeare, is that of the virtuous behaviour towards
one another of two individuals united in sinning against every one else.
Gottfried von Strassburg narrates with the greatest detail how Tristram
leads to the unsuspecting king the unblushing, unremorseful woman
polluted by his own embraces; how Yseult substitutes on the wedding
night her spotless damsel Brangwaine for her own sullied self; then,
terrified lest the poor victim of her dishonour should ever reveal it,
attempts to have her barbarously murdered, and, finally, seeing that
nothing can shake the heroic creature's faith, admits her once more to
be the remorseful go-between in her amours. He narrates how Tristram
dresses as a pilgrim and carries the queen from a ship to the shore, in
order that Yseult may call on Christ to bear witness by a miracle that
she is innocent of adultery, never having been touched save by that
pilgrim and her own husband; and how, when the followers of King Mark
have surrounded the grotto in the wood, Tristram places the drawn sword
between himself and the sleeping queen, as a symbol of their chastity
which the king is too honest to suspect. He draws, with a psychological
power truly extraordinary in the beginning of the thirteenth century,
the two other figures in this love drama: King Mark, cheated,
dishonoured, oscillating between horrible doubt, ignominious suspicion
and more ignominious credulity, his love for his wife, his trust in his
nephew, his incapacity for conceiving ill-faith and fraud, the very
gentleness and generosity of his nature, made the pander of guilt in
which he cannot believe; and, on the other side, Brangwaine, the
melancholy, mute victim of her fidelity to Yseult, the weak, heroic
soul, rewarded only with cruel ingratitude, and condemned to screen and
help the sin which she loathes and for which she assumes the awful
responsibility. All this does Gottfried do, yet without ever seeming to
perceive the baseness and wickedness of this tissue o