d German poets of the Middle Ages,
are without imaginative or emotional interest; nothing can be further
from my thoughts. The Nibelung story possesses, both in the Norse and in
the Middle High German version, a tragic fascination; and a quaint
fairy-tale interest, every now and then rising to the charm of a
Decameronian _novella_, is possessed by many of the Keltic tales,
whether briefly told in the Mabinogion or lengthily detailed by
Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. But all this is the
interest of the mere story, and you would enjoy it almost as much if
that story were related not by a poet but by a peasant; it is the
fascination of the mere theme, with the added fascination of our own
unconscious filling up and colouring of details. And the poem itself,
whence we extract this theme, remains, for the most part, uninteresting.
The figures are vague, almost shapeless and colourless; they have no
well-understood mental and moral anatomy, so that when they speak and
act the writer seems to have no clear conception of the motives or
tempers which make them do so; even as in a child's pictures, the horses
gallop, the men run, the houses stand, but without any indication of the
muscles which move the horse, of the muscles which hold up the man, of
the solid ground upon which is built, nay rather, into which is planted,
the house. Hatred of Hagen, devotion of Ruedger, passionate piety of
Parzival--all these are things of which we do not particularly see the
how or why; we do not follow the reasons, in event or character, which
make these men sacrifice themselves or others, weep, storm, and so
forth; nay, even when these reasons are clear from the circumstances, we
are not shown the action of the mechanism, we do not see how Brunhilt is
wroth, how Chriemhilt is revengeful, how Herzeloid is devoted to
Parzival. There is, in the vast majority of this mediaeval poetry, no
clear conception of the construction and functions of people's
character, and hence no conception either of those actions and reactions
of various moral organs which, after all, are at the bottom of the
events related. Herein lies the difference between the forms of the
Middle Ages and those of Antiquity; for how perfectly felt, understood,
is not every feeling and every action of the Homeric heroes, how
perfectly indicated! We can see the manner and reason of the conflict of
Achilles and Agamemnon, of the behaviour of the returned Odysseus, as
cle