[In the following essay, Gosse examines Walther's life, traces the succession of his patrons, and explains how politics, religion, and folk songs influenced his poetry.]

When the history of mediæval poetry comes to be written we shall understand, perhaps, what must remain very dark till then, how it was that during the marvellous twelfth century, amid all the chaos of the shattering and building of empires, such sudden simultaneous chords of melody were shot crosswise through the length and breadth of Europe, interpenetrating Iceland and Provence, Acquitaine and Austria, Normandy and Italy, with an irresistible desire for poetic production. In that mysterious atmosphere, in an air so burdened with electric force, the ordinary rules of germination and growth were set aside; out of barbarous races, and wielding the uncouthest of tongues, poets sprang full-armed, so many Athenes born suddenly adult from the forehead of the new Gothic civilisation. That was an age of rapid movement and brilliant development, an age thirsting for discovery and invention, ready with one hand to fill the West with the new-found marvel of the pointed arch, with the other to push with sword and cross far into the fabulous East. It was at such a time, under such violent auspices, that poetry was born, full-grown, in Germany; the rude-bud of folksong blossom ing in one single generation into the most elaborate art, only to wither again, as is the wont of such sudden blooms, in as short a time as it had taken to expand. No more such brilliant verse was written in Germany, until the time of Goethe, as was produced between the years 1150 and 1220, by a group of poets residing mainly at the courts of Austria and Thuringia. It would be out of place here to give any sketch, however slight, of the influences brought to bear upon them from without. We must hurry over the various cardinal points which demand mention, before we can intelligibly introduce the subject of this memoir. It was about the year 1140 that an Austrian knight, whose name has not been preserved, gathered into epical shape the scattered ballads which form what we know as the ‘Nibelungenlied.’ Somewhat later, another Austrian, of equally obscure personality, collected the priceless epos of ‘Kudrun.’ The minne-song, the lyric of love, was at the same epoch invented or imported by the great German lyrist, Heinrich von Veldecke, and his example was shortly followed by the simultaneous outburst of the four great poetic voices of mediæval Germany—the nightingales as they called themselves—Gottfried von Strassburg, Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Walther von der Vogelweide. The genius of the first three of these was essentially epical. In the ‘Tristan’ of Gottfried, in the ‘Iwein’ of Hartmann, in the ‘Parzival’ and the ‘Titurel’ of Wolfram, we have the four great epics of romance literature, the four poetic pillars on which the whole structure of High-German language and literature rests. In these unique works, steeped in the purest colours of knight-errantry and chivalry, and written in verse-forms of astonishingly delicate art, we have in its original and undiluted form that spirit of romance that has so often since fascinated and bewitched the youth of Europe into more or less fatuous imitation. By the side of this native poetry may be set the epics of foreign extraction, the masterpiece among which was that ‘Alexandersage’ of the Pfaffe Lamprecht so extravagantly eulogised by Gervinus. But this epical literature was not the sole product of the age; a lyrical growth accompanied it, represented by myriads of minor singers, and one man that by common consent ranks as high as the three great epicists. This first of mediæval German song-writers was Walther von der Vogelweide.

Over the earliest years of his life there rests an obscurity which is likely to remain impenetrable. We know neither the year nor the place of his birth, his rank in society, nor the name of his family. In lack of clearer data than his own verses give us, we may roughly put his birth down at about the year 1170, or nearly a century before that of Dante. That he was of gentle, but not noble birth, is judged by the title given him by all of his contemporaries of Herr Walther, the ‘Herr’ being the token of the knightly middle class, in contradistinction to the burghers, who were styled Meister.¹ Over his appellative ‘von der Vogelweide’ a great deal of ingenious speculation has been expended. ‘Walther of the Bird Meadow’ has been fancifully supposed to be a name adopted by himself, either to signify that he was born in some hamlet secluded in the midst of the forest, among the birds, or else merely in token of his own great love for wild places and little birds. But ‘Fogilweida’ is understood to mean aviarium in Middle High German; that is to say, an enclosed space where birds are artificially confined. It would therefore be difficult to believe that the lover of wild things would take this name from choice, and fortunately the difficulty has been cleared up very lately by the discovery in an old manuscript of the thirteenth century, of the existence of an estate called Vogelweide in the Tyrol, which has now long since disappeared, and there is little doubt that it was hence our poet came, especially as one of his friends and followers, a sweet minor minne-singer of that time, Leutolt von Seven, was born, we know, in that very valley in Tyrol. This mountain province, even in that early time, had not a little thirst after literary glory, and several of its poets, contemporary with Walther, have been fortunate enough to have their ‘Lieder’ preserved, now to be piecemeal printed by modern admirers. Walther, however, was not satisfied with a local reputation, and very early in life he seems to have left the paternal home to seek his fortune in Vienna.

There was no more attractive city in Germany to a young man with his life before him than the capital of Austria in 1190. No part of the Empire was so prosperous or so devoted to the graceful arts as the neighbourhood of the Viennese court, and, what would have special fascination for Walther, nowhere were the poets so brilliant, so popular, and so famous in their art. Jealous of the undisputed supremacy of Cologne, Vienna was taking advantage of its own security and prosperity to establish its position as the second city, at least, of the Empire, if it could not be the first. It seems that the raw lad from the Tyrol, with nothing to live on but his genius, came and put himself under the tuition of the most famous lyrist of that age, Reinmar the Old, and lost in the blaze of the Court and the noise of rival wits, we hear no more of him for eight years. It must not be imagined that he was idle during that time; it was no light task to learn to be a minne-singer. The poetry of that early age, so far from being the simple, wild-wood fluting that is idly and generally supposed, was a metrical art of the most elaborate kind, and one for the skilful performance of which a long and patient apprenticeship was needed. Out of the one hundred and eighty-eight poems of Walther's which exist, at least half are written in unique measures, and all in forms of his own invention. He soon surpassed all his forerunners, even Reinmar himself, in the intricate mysteries of verse, and it is worthy of no small admiration how supple the stiff old High German becomes in his masterly hands. We shall return to this matter; for the present it may suffice to point out that the blank years 1190-1198 must have been full of laborious exercise, and that all in which he differs from other poets in this, is that he has not seen fit to hand down to us his juvenilia. At the same time, there is no reason against supposing that many of his most beautiful love-songs, which carry no internal or external evidence of date, belong to this early period. However that may be, it is not till 1198 that we catch a distinct view of our poet for the first time.

Indeed, there is a theory that almost all the naïve and spontaneous lyrics of Walther's minne-period date from this first Vienna life, and that it was the death of the Emperor Henry VI. that first woke the poet out of his dream of love and pleasure, and that aroused in him that noble spirit of patriotism which has made his name so fragrant ever since. Henry VI. had raised the Empire to a position of secure prosperity and dreaded power which it had never reached before; he was still in the flower of his age, and apparently at the opening of a brilliant career. Suddenly he died at Messina, on September 28, 1197, and the earliest political poem of Walther's that we possess evidently marks the tide of feeling at home when the deplorable news was brought to Germany. With his head resting in the palm of his hand, and one knee over the other, and his elbow resting on the upper knee, the poet sits on a rock overlooking the world, and speculates, not without dismay, how fortune, honour, and God's grace are to be reconciled in this bereaved and helmless state. In the next strophe he sees a great water rushing by, with fish in it, and gazing past it he sees the forest: and these fish, and the birds, beasts—yea, and the very worms in the forest, have their order and their rulers, but Germany has none. In the third part he is gifted with prophetic sight, and sees all things done, and hears all things said, by all the men and women in the world, and behold, they all with one accord lift up their hands to God and cry ‘Woe! for the Pope is too young! Lord, help thy Christendom.’ In this first poem of political import we have some of the most characteristic utterances of Walther's muse: desire of order and hatred of anarchy, yearning for the unity of Germany, and deep-rooted suspicion of the Papacy. The mention of the youth of the Pope gives us a hint of the exact date of the poem, since Innocent III. was elected in January 1198, at the unusually early age of thirty-seven.

The death of the great Emperor was coeval with the breaking up of Walther's Viennese home. For some reason obscure to us, Austria was no longer favourable to his prospects. Perhaps the fate of Heinrich had less to do with it than the death of his beloved patron, Duke Friedrich, who was lingering in Palestine at the extreme end of the Third Crusade, and who fell, in April 1198, a few months before his great rival Richard Cœur de Lion defeated the French in the battle of Gisors. It was an epoch of great deeds and names sonorous with romance. While Walther was learning the art of poetry under Reinmar, the terrible Sultan Saladin had died. To return to Vienna: in place of Friedrich, Leopold VII. ascended the Austrian throne, and in him Walther had at first to mourn an irresponsive patron. We possess an artful elegy over Friedrich, in which his successor is warned to imitate the generosity of the duke, but to so little purpose that we find Walther leaving Vienna precipitately, to offer his singing services to Philip of Suabia. As Friedrich died in April, and as we find Walther singing at Mayence on occasion of King Philip's coronation in September of the same year, we can hardly allow that he gave Leopold time to do justice to his powers. The poem is very flattering, but from a lyrical point of view particularly flat and inefficient. The excellent and handsome Philip responded, however, to our poet's praise of his magnanimity and his beauty, so far, at least, as to take him with him in 1199 to the Diet of Magdeburg, where Walther gives us a brilliant little picture of the procession of Philip and his Greek queen Irene to church, attended by a gay throng of Thuringian and Saxon nobles. Next year he was back again in Vienna, welcomed this time by Leopold, and rewarded for his songs by largesse from the hands of that young ‘glorious and liberal’ prince. On May 28, 1200, when Leopold took the sword in solemn pomp as Duke of Austria, gifts of ‘not less than thirty pounds’ were made in all directions, and Walther, who had complained in 1198 that the showers of fortune fell on all sides of him but left him dry, was plentifully moistened with golden rain, and had his debts paid. This brings us to the end of his first restless period. From 1200 until 1210 he seems to have stayed quietly in Austria.

The only important event that occurred during this peaceful decade was the death of his great master in poesy, Reinmar the Old. This occurred in 1207. Reinmar, who originally came from Hagenau—that very Hagenau where, in Walther's early manhood, Richard of England was arraigned before a Diet of the Empire—was par éminence the poet of melancholy passion and tender reverie, and very unlike the joyous, manly figure of Walther. There is a tradition that they did not live together on the friendliest terms—a notion that is curiously borne out by the wording of a very musical and thoughtful elegy by the younger on the elder poet, in which he expressly says that it is not Reinmar he mourns, but his art. The death of Reinmar gave occasion to one of the most important contemporary notices of Walther which have come down to us. Gottfried von Strassburg, far away in Alsace, received the news as he was writing the eighth book of his great epic of ‘Tristan.’ He broke off to celebrate and mourn ‘the nightingale of Hagenau,’ and to weave into his narrative a critical sketch of all the great poets of his time. Reinmar has fallen with the banner in his grasp, and the minne-singers are left without a leader. Gottfried takes up his prophecy:—

Who now shall lead our congregation?
Whose voice guide this dear singing nation?
I know full well whom ye will find
Bear best that banner to your mind;
That Vogelweide it must be
Whose clear high voice rings merrily
In fields and in the open air!
Who sings of wondrous things and fair,
Whose art is like an organ's tone,
Whose songs are tuned in Citheron
To please our goddess Lady of Love.(2)

This testimony, from such a man, proves how far the young poet's fame had already reached, and how highly he was esteemed.

Except that in this same year, 1207, Walther was so frightened by comets and shooting stars that he was sure the Last Judgment was arriving, nothing seems to have occurred in his history until 1210, when we find him in the service of Duke Berhard of Karinthia, where he was so ill at ease that in 1211 he migrated again; and this time to the very home of polite letters, Thuringia, where the young landgrave, Hermann, gathered around him all the most advanced spirits of the age. At the Thuringian Court on the Wartburg, close by Eisenach, Albrecht von Halberstadt was busy with his German version of Ovid's ‘Metamorphoses;’ Herbert von Fritslar was composing his epic on the tale of Troy; Heinrich von Veldecke, the greatest of Walther's predecessors, had just died, hard by in Naumburg; and, best of all, Walther learnt here to know the rare and exalted genius of Wolfram von Eschenbach, who was writing his deathless ‘Parzival,’ amid the roaring joviality and hospitable freedom of the Wartburg, of which Walther, whom it suited less, gives a striking picture. This seems to have been a time of depression and morbid irritation with our wandering poet. His bitterest epigrams against Pope Innocent III. date from this period, and the merry life at Eisenach seems to have jarred upon his melancholy. He is plaintively humorous against a certain knight Gerhard Etze, who has stolen his horse, and on whom he revenges himself by describing him thus:

He rolls his eyes as monkeys do,
But most he's like the lewd cuckoo,

and other such uncouth pleasantries in the lumbering manner of the Middle Ages. From Thuringia the dissatisfied man turned to the service of Dietrich, Margrave of Meissen, and remained with him till 1213. It is provoking, and a little humiliating, to read the verse-petitions addressed to one monarch after another, praying for protection and shelter, and urging liberality in the style of a charity sermon. Under Dietrich as under Hermann, Walther was a liege servant of the Emperor Otto IV., whose excommunication by the poet's pet aversion, Pope Innocent, provokes him to continual wrath. In all his poems against the Papacy, he writes with a freedom and a force that are truly remarkable, and Luther himself never spoke out more plainly than Walther von der Vogelweide in one little ‘Spruch’ or sonnet, where he urges the division of all temporal and spiritual authority, that being given to God which is God's, and that to the Kaiser which is his. Germany was divided between rival Emperors. Otto IV. was pitted, to the great danger of the whole Hohenstaufen dynasty, against the legitimate heir to the throne, Friedrich, the young son of Henry VI. The civil war between these princes was carried on for ten years, and by-and-by we find Walther growing impatient with his patron, and urging him, at any cost, to endanger the unity of Germany no longer. Presently he describes with enthusiasm the fine presence and masculine beauty of Otto, but pathetically wishes he were as liberal as he is tall. Things rapidly get worse and worse, till at last Walther takes up his parable against Otto as a double-faced monster, and openly comes over to the cause of Friedrich. This was but the instinct of a wise rather than grateful man of the world, for the poem we have mentioned last seems to belong to the year 1215, in which Friedrich II. finally gained the day. A series of moving appeals to the clemency of Friedrich meet us next. If only the great man will smile, the poet's genius, now frozen as in winter, will reblossom and revive. He says that—

Then will I sing again of little birds,
          Of heather, and of flowers, as once I sang:
Of lovely women and their gracious words,
          And cheeks where roses red and lilies sprang.(3)

Vienna seems once more to have become his settled home, and in 1217 we read his farewell to Leopold, who, with the flower of Austrian chivalry, was then starting for Palestine on the fifth Crusade. Their departure leaves the court and city as empty and dull, we are told, as the departure of the knights of the Table Round, when they parted on the quest of the Graal, left Arthur's fabulous city. The public of Walther's day, it must be remembered, were even more familiar than we are with the Arthurian legends. The humorous tone of this song, however, soon fades in genuine apprehension, and we have a poem in which, in a strain of the tenderest and most child-like piety, he begs God to guard him as Gabriel guarded Jesus in the crib at Bethlehem. To this period belongs a curious lyrical tirade against the roughness of the young knights, who have no care for courtesy and the dignity of women. For such licentious and froward mediæval youth, Walther has but one lesson, and he repeats it incessantly—

And wilt thou gild the round of life, of women speak thou well.

The two years between Leopold's departure and his happy return in 1219 were lightened by brief visits to Styria and Bavaria, but he was back again in Vienna to welcome his prince, and to send a joyous note of congratulation after him when he set out once more, this time to be crowned at Rome in the winter of 1220. It must have been about the same year that he gained the friendship of Englebert, the stirring Prince Archbishop of Cologne, under whose special protection he flourished until 1225, when that gifted prelate was murdered by his own nephew. As time goes by, as the poet grows older, and as one friend and patron is taken from him after the other, he loses gradually the elasticity of intellect that had so long sustained him, and there comes to be something almost querulous in his tone. In cadences that become monotonous, he mourns the disappearance of honour, art, piety and virtue from the land, and it is not always that the sadness is tempered with so much sweetness as in the following poem, which we translate as literally as possible, with the poet's own rhymes and measure. He has been ill all through the winter, and only revives when spring is in the land once more:—

The hoar-frost thrilled the little birds with pain,
                    And so they ceased their singing;
But now the year grows beautiful again,
                    Anew the heath is springing.
I saw the flowers and grasses strive amain
                    Which should the taller be—
I told my lady this sweet history.
O how I suffered through the wintry hours
                    And grievous frosty weather!
I thought I nevermore should see red flowers
                              Among the dark green heather;
Yet, had I died, 'twere grief to friends of ours,
                    Good folk who when I sang
So gladly danced about for joy and sprang.
Had I been dumb on this delightful day,
                    For me it were great sorrow;
And Joy, so smitten, would have fled away,
                    And for no happier morrow
Would Joy have said farewell, O well-a-day!
                    May God preserve you all,
So that ye pray that health may me befall.(4)

The poet need not much longer detain us from the poems. After the murder of Engelbert the religious tendency of Walther's character seems to have deepened into pietism. It is, therefore, fitting that we meet with him next at the court of Hermann's successor, Ludwig, Landgrave of Thuringia, who, as husband of St. Elizabeth and patron of the ecclesiastical party, was as fanatic as his predecessor had been dilettante. But Hermann's ring of poets was by this time broken up; one by one they disappear, as is the wont of mediæval poets, fading from our sight with no record of their death. Ludwig was a child of the new age, the characteristic man of the fanatic epoch just commencing. With the year 1226 a sudden accession of pietism was felt throughout Europe; the life-long devotion of St. Francis of Assisi was crowned by his mystical death, and France was at once consolidated and fully reconciled to the Papacy by the accession of a still sweeter because more human saint, St. Louis. The power of the Empire, on the other hand, was visibly shaken. In vain Friedrich, ‘the world's wonder,’ had trusted to the power of his individual tact and genius to frustrate the petulant intrigues of Pope after Pope. He was the most brilliant of the Hohenstaufen emperors, but under him the power of the dynasty faded into air. His independence of religious opinion was not shared by the tributary Princes of the Empire, and among the malcontents none was more ardent than this young Landgrave of Thuringia. At the court of Eisenach, in 1226, Walther must have often seen the slight pale figure of the austere girl who ruled the ruler of the Thuringians. Mystical, hysterical, a dreamer of dreams, the wife of the Landgrave Ludwig was among the most singular of the characters of that dramatic age. We know her best as St. Elizabeth of Hungary, that very saint round whom some of the most charming myths of the Middle Ages cluster. Not, we may be sure, without strenuous help from her did Walther von der Vogelweide, in 1227, address a burning word of lyrical exhortation to Ludwig to start on a new Crusade, to win back Palestine once more. In all Walther's latest poems we may fairly trace the inspiring influence of personal intercourse with St. Elizabeth, and the verses which breathe the fullest perfume of her pure devotion are among the deepest nd most exalted that he has left. Always a child of his age and a representative man, we see him in the early troubadour times throwing all his force into the courtly cultus of the Lady of Love, in the internecine struggles of the candidates for empire, preaching with a louder, clearer voice than any other the gospel of unity and independence; now in his old age rousing to the new religious fervour, and contributing to its psalmody the crown of spiritual songs. Ludwig obeyed the summons, and started under the banner of the Emperor Friedrich in the autumn of 1227. Two beautiful ‘Kreuzlieder’ of Walther's—crusade-songs that manifestly belong to this pilgrimage—still exist, and from their wording it has been considered that one was composed after the melancholy delay at Otranto, where Ludwig and many others died of the plague, the other in Palestine itself. I myself, however, am inclined to hold with that most careful critic, the late Franz Pfeiffer, that these poems contain nothing that could not as well have been written in Germany as in the Holy Land. One strophe of the first will illustrate the measure and manner of them:—

O God, thy succour send us,
Thy saving right hand lend us,
Till all is done befriend us,
                                                  Till all this life is o'er;
In all our onward stations
Defend us from temptations:
We know the hellish nations
                              Are round us tempting sore;
O lead us with this ditty,
Right on to thy lone city!
Jerusalem, in pity
                              We weep for evermore!(5)

With the departure of the Crusade, Walther's last light seems to have gone out. Sad and weary he turned to his old Tyrolese home, and found all there changed and desolate, after forty years of absence. It was probably then, and sore at heart to find himself forgotten, that the old world-weary poet composed his last and finest poem. The burden of life was never sung with more passionate sorrow; the very rhythm seems to have a wailing echo in it. We have essayed to render part of this exquisite elegy, with as little loss as possible of its naïveté and pathos:—

Woe's me, where are they vanished, my years of life that flew?
O has my life been but a dream, or has it all been true?
Was that a lie I cherished, that truth I vaunted so,
For, lo! it seems I've been asleep, and nothing now I know.
Now have I wakened; all is dim! I cannot understand
What, ere I slept, was plain to me as is my either hand;
This folk and land amidst of which my life arose so well,
Have grown my foes, and all is strange, and why I cannot tell.
My life is bowed with burdens, 'tis more than I can bear;
The world is full of sorrow and weary with despair;
And when I think of time long past, of wondrous vanished days,
Grief takes me like a sudden wave that breaks on ocean-ways.
The very youth that were so gay, how sadly now they fare,
Their eyes are bowed with wretchedness, their lips are full of care;
All they can do is mourn and weep; alas! why do they so?
Where'er I turn in all the world no happy man I know.
Dance, laughter, singing, all forgot and sadly put away,
No man throughout all Christendom has joy in these to-day;
Mark how the women little heed the tiring on their head!
The proudest knights are fain to lie in boorish drowsihead.
O would that I might bear a shield and take a sword in hand,
Would God that I were worthy found to fight for his dear land!
Then should I, poor albeit I seem, myself a rich man hold,
Yet not in acres have my wealth, nor master be of gold.
But I should bear upon my head the bright eternal crown
That one poor soldier with a spear can conquer for his own;
O might I that dear voyage make, and wend across the sea,
For ever would I ‘glory!’ cry, and nevermore ‘Woe's me,’
                                                                      And nevermore ‘Woe's me!’(6)

Such, or rather far sweeter and more musical than we have art to make it, is Walther's swan-song, and with it he fades out of our sight. The only traditional fact that can help us is, that he retired to an estate near Würzburg, in Franconia, which Friedrich had given him, and that he quietly passed away about 1235, having survived all the rivals and friends of his youth. It is said that he was buried under a linden in a grass-plot surrounded by the cloisters of Würzburg Minster, in a sweet poétic sanctity, shielded from the world, yet open to the sky, and a leafy haunt of birds. Out of the great love he had for those his winged rivals of the woods, there arose a charming legend, that has done more than anything else to popularise his memory, to the effect that in his last testament he left a special provision directing that every day the birds should receive food and drink upon his tombstone, so that the branches of the linden that hung over him should never cease to resound with the voices he had so tenderly loved and so exquisitely imitated. Many poets competed to write his praise when he was dead, but none with such a naïve felicity as Hugo von Trimberg, in his well-known couplet:—

Hêr Walther von der Vogelweide,
Swer des vergæz', der tæt' mir leide.

‘Who thee forgets, does me a wrong!’

It is time now to examine the poems which remain to us of the work of this great man, whose troubled and unhappy life we have traced to its final repose. In the course of the previous narrative we have spoken of the political section of his verses, for it is from these that we have extracted, not without much labour, the greater part of the history of his life. Full of biographical interest as they are, however, they do not form by any means the most attractive or important section of his labour. In treating Walther as a political or as a religious poet, we must not forget that his great claim to remembrance rests, not on the lyrics which he composed in these capacities, but on the matchless ‘minnelieder,’ love-songs, which were the first-fruits of his youth. In reading these we find ourselves face to face with the earliest blossom of pure chivalry. As might be expected in the lyrical work of a generation that blended the sentiment of ‘Kudrun’ with that of ‘Parzival,’ the Scandinavian toleration of women, born of something like indifference, with the Provençal gallantry, born of poetic passion, the German love-songs of the school that culminated in Walther have a tender elevation, a serene sweetness more courtly than the Northern, less sensuous than the Southern erotic literature.

French influence on German literature was more epical than lyrical, more through such writers as Chrétien de Troyes than through the troubadours; although the laws of love, as settled by such potentates as the Countess of Champagne and Ermengarde, Lady of Narbonne, were accepted in the whole world of lovers, and are reflected by the simpler poems of the minne-singers. Some very curious and interesting links between Provence and Germany have however been detected, and are worthy of note. Friedrich von Husen, a minne-singer who was wandering through Italy and the South of France from 1175 to 1186, must have become familiar with the Southern writers, for we find a strophe of Folquet, the troubadour-bishop of Marseilles, transferred into one of his poems. It may amuse the curious reader to set the passages side by side. This is the Provençal original:—

Qu'el garda vos eus ten tan car,
Quel cor s'en fai nescis semblar,
Quel sens i met l'engenh e la valor,
Si qu'en error
Laissal cor pel sen quel rete;
Qu'om me parla (maintas vetz m'endeve)
Qu'eu no sai que,
Em saluda qu'en non aug re.
Pero jamais nuls hom nom occaizo,
Sim saluda et eu mot no li so.

This is the paraphrase of Friedrich von Husen:—

Si darf mich des zîhen niet
Ichn hete si von herzen liep.
Des mohte si die wârheit an mir sehen,
Und wil sis jehen.
Ich kom sîn dicke in solhe nôt,
Daz ich den liuten guoten morgen bôt
Engegen der naht,
Ich was sô verre an si verdâht,
Daz ich mich underwîlent niht versan,
Und swer mich gruozte daz ichs niht vernan.

In Heinrich von Veldecke we meet similar signs of Provençal influence, and in the poems of Count Ruodolf of Neuenburg the imitations of Folquet and Peire Vidal form quite a prominent feature. Such conventional influence from the South, however, is rare, and what strikes us most prominently in the lyrics of Walther, and what gives them that inherent excellence which has kept them fresh after six hundred years, is the resolute manner in which, in defiance of the artistic theories of the age, he constantly returns to the study of nature, and the folk-song as an inspired emanation from nature. His verse is full of clear little landscapes, warm with colour and sunlight, like those that fill the backgrounds of the earliest German and Flemish painters. The great fault of mediæval poetry being that it is conventional, mannered, and artificial, the student of that poetry best knows how like a fountain in the desert such a clear trill of song as the following ballad of Walther's seems. There is a versified paraphrase of it by Thomas Beddoes, the author of ‘Death's Jest Book;’ but so inaccurate is it, that I prefer to lay before the reader a translation in literal prose, the intricate harmony of the original measure seeming to defy translation:—

Under the linden
On the heath,
There our double bed we made;
There might you find
Indeed
Broken flowers as well as grass.
In front of the forest in a valley
Tandaradei!
Sweetly sang the nightingale.
I wandered
To the field;
Thither was my beloved come.
There was I so taken,—
Blessed Lady!
That I shall evermore be happy.
Did he kiss me? O, a thousand times
Tandaradei!
See how red my mouth is!
There had he made
So rich
A bed of flowers;
Had anyone come by,
Inwardly
He would have laughed,
Since among the roses he might well
Tandaradei!
Have marked where my head had lain.
That he was there by my side
If any were to know,
(God forbid it!) I might be shamed.
What there befell
No one knows
But he himself and I
And one little bird,—
Tandaradei!
And she may well be trusted.(7)

The innocent sweetness of these lines reaches at one bound the absolute perfection of such writing. In our own rich poetic literature we have equalled, but none could excel, its divine simplicity and purity. In Germany it remains without a rival in its own peculiar class, the finest songs of Mörike coming closest, perhaps, to it. The genius of the folk-song was never more exquisitely wedded to the art of accomplished verse. Among characteristics that Walther owes to his reverent study of the volks-lied, may be mentioned his manner of contemplating the seasons, and their natural phenomena. Spring is his favourite time, and he is divided between the joyous excitement of seeing the flowers break through the snow,—delicate reminiscence, perhaps, of the gentians on his own Tyrolese mountain sides,—and the still contentment of May, the month of blossoms, that links spring with summer. He has his flower of flowers; the heather is to him what the daisy was to Chaucer. His songs are full of references to the tender beauty of the rose-red bells that bud and break out of the dark green sprays. He is never tired of this one flower; when he is ill and like to die in winter, it is the sight of the heather in bloom that brings back to him the desire to live. Some of his images give the heather a sweet significance; in one minne-lied he says: ‘The heather blushes red in spring to see how green the forest is growing, so sorrow is ashamed at sight of joy.’ But it is not the simple flower of the wilds that can bewitch him in his excitable moments. Then the forest must receive him in its murmurous depths, to wander there till the poet's mood of restlessness is over. ‘I love the heather with all its manifold colours, but I love the forest better still, for within it there are many wonderful things.’ But for the winter he spares his hatred. Few men have said more petulant things about the winter-time than Walther. The first line of the first poem in the collected edition of his works reads: ‘The winter has done us all manner of harm: heather and forest have both lost their colour, but many a voice will soon sound sweetly there again. As soon as I see the maidens playing at ball in the streets, then I know it is time to hear the birds again. Would that I might sleep away all the hours of winter! for watching and waiting, I grow angry that its power should spread so far and wide. God knows it must soon give place to May, and then we shall have flowers again where now we have frost.’ In another early poem he says: ‘I am grown as uncouth as Esau, my smooth hair has become all rough (with winter cold). Sweet summer, where art thou? I long to see how the fields lie once more. Rather than go on suffering as I am doing now, I would go and be a monk at Toberlû.’ Toberlû being, it seems, an excessively bleak and dreary Cistercian monastery in Westphalia. Once only does he speak well of winter. That one good word is to be found in the latest group of his ‘minne-lieder,’ where at last the obdurate lady of his love has rewarded his patient passion with a declaration of her submission. That first winter of bliss cannot be denounced as winters in general are. He blames the days for being so short, but satisfies himself with this true lover's philosophy:—

          If the winter days be brief,
                    Longer last the winter nights;
          Loved and lover find relief,
                    Rest and bliss in love's delights.
What have I said? Woe's me! in silence best
                    Such rapture were confessed.(8)

There is one exquisite ‘tagslied’ or ‘aubade’ as the French would call it, song of dawn and awakening, in which the Juliet finds a thousand plausible reasons why her Romeo should take no heed of the day-star that shines out of the grey sky in testimony of the approach of morning. Fresh as dew or a newly opened flower, such poems as these, perfumed with gaiety, chivalry and romance, come down to us with the first principles of love and poesy upon their innocent rhythms. In the originality and beauty of his ‘tagslieder,’ however, Walther does not equal Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose amorous ‘sentinel-songs’ are the most exquisite German imitations of the Provençal ‘alba,’ of the origin and purpose of which Dr. Hueffer gives a full account in his valuable work on the Troubadours. These earliest lispings of the vernacular are naïve with the simplicity not so much of a child as of some adult creature newly gifted with a voice, some Dryad or Oread just cumbered with humanity. Their sweetness is primitive and unaffected, and we listen to them with surprise to find the things they tell us so familiar and yet so freshly put. The Middle High German, too, has a dreamy dignity about it that is lacking in the German of to-day; there are none of the harsh labial compounds that grate upon the ear, and mar so much of the melody even of Goethe and Heine; there is none of the garrulous flatness that mars its other child, the otherwise rich and graceful tongue of modern Holland. It is inherently, in all its distinction and its imperfection, the language of romance, as old French is par excellence the language of chivalry

All this while we have said nothing about the class of his poems for which Walther was most admired by his contemporaries, and in which they took most interest, the ‘minne-lieder.’ Criticism loves above all things to linger around the peculiarities and individualities of a character, and shrinks from the needful task of considering its uniformities. Minne-singing was the fashion of the time, and of Walther himself we learn least from the love-songs. Yet, considered simply as poetry, and as the culmination of an interesting literature, they are worthy of our careful attention. The relative position of a poet and his mistress, of any knight and his liege lady, was but recently defined by the fantastic laws of chivalry. The elaborate system of gallantry that was instituted in the South of France, and out of which there gradually developed a passion for amorous litigation which was never equalled for frivolity before or since, had not penetrated as far as Germany. A simpler, sweeter fashion prevailed among the patrons of the minne-singers, and the new discovery of the lofty worth of woman was pushed to no foolish excess of affectation. It seems to have been customary for every minstrel who felt in himself a calling to sing of love, to choose a mistress to whom to pour out his ardour and his melancholy. Considering the roughness of the times, it is very singular that the ordinary tone of the verses produced should be so reticent, so delicate as it is. These are the words in which Walther first introduces us to the lady of his love:—‘When the flowers are springing out of the grass, laughing up at the wanton sun, in a May morning early, and the little birds are singing in the very best way they can, what can be likened to that? It is well-nigh heaven itself. Should we say what it likens, I could have said what I have seen much better, and I would say so still, could I only see that glorious sight again. It was where a noble, beautiful, pure woman, well robed and well adorned, went in company with many folk, with lofty bearing and not alone, looking slowly around her from time to time, going as the sun goeth among the stars. Let May bring us all its wonders, what has it so wonderfully sweet as this her lovely body? We let all the flowers stand waiting, and gaze upon this perfect woman.’

We are forcibly reminded in this beautiful description of Walther's first sight of his mistress of the passage in the ‘Vita Nuova,’ where Dante sees Beatrice among the other fair Florentine girls, outshining them all. There is a grace in the picture that recalls the slim maidens of some early Tuscan procession, in attendance on a queen who easily surpasses them in dignity and beauty. Presently the first awe of the stricken senses gives way to passion that exalts and excites the imagination, and in the next poem his hands are longing to adorn her. In language at once ardent and reverent, he declares that her simple robes should be set off with chains of jewels, and since he is poor and cannot buy these, he will throw about her garlands of red and white flowers that have sprung in forest depths to the sound of the singing of birds. He flies to the woodlands to get these chaplets for her, and in the leafy solitude he makes bold to tell us how he declared his love for her to herself. It was underneath a blossoming tree that he told her, and the air so shivered with his passion that the petals were loosed from the boughs and fell in a soft rain at their feet. In his next song he is less rapturous. It is the beauty and goodness of his dear lady that have bewitched him, and her red mouth that laughs so sweetly; and his own diction, as he says so, is so felicitous and bright, that we think of Heine in his few joyous ‘Lieder.’ Presently we learn that some great national disaster has fallen upon Germany; but Walther can hardly refrain from singing, for he is thinking of his mistress. He is like a happy child forced to attend a funeral, who is chided for an involuntary peal of laughter. But a sadder tone comes in, a chord of apprehension jarring on the joyful music. His lady holds aloof, and while permitting him to be her declared servant, will grant him no favour, and pronounce no word of comfort. The rapture gives way to a strain of exquisitely gracious supplication. ‘If thou art indifferent to me I know not. I love thee! This one thing is hard to bear. Thou lookest past me and over me. I cannot bear this my burden of love alone. If thou wilt only deign to share it, I can easily bear it.’ There is something extremely genuine and pathetic in this broken cry of hope deferred, and the simple confession that it is very hard to be unable to fix her look a moment, that she will ‘look past me and over me.’ We seem suddenly brought face to face, pulse to pulse, with the living man in such a natural ejaculation of wounded love and vanity as this. In the next poem we learn something of the proud lady's station. ‘Hêrzeliebez Frouwelîn,’ he says, ‘heart-beloved maiden, many blame me that I love one so poor as thou art and of so low estate. This I bear as I have borne, as I will ever bear; thou art beautiful, and thou art rich enough for me. I would not give the glass ring round thy finger for a queen's gold.’ The next song lends itself so kindly to our English, that we cannot refrain from giving one stanza in verse:—

God of her face had great delight:
          He spread such precious colours there,
So purely red, so purely white,
          Here rosy-flushed, there lily-fair:
O, I would see her gladlier far,—
          Dared I to say so without sinning,—
Than heaven or heaven's bright chariot-star:
          Poor fool, is this thy praise-beginning?
For if I lift my words so high
The trespass of my mouth may make my heart to sigh.(9)

Whereupon he melts into a reverie about her lips, so ripely red for kissing, and wonders if he shall ever win them for his own; the whole somewhat unusually amorous strain being accounted for in some measure by the last stanza, in which we learn how he fainted, wounded by her loveliness, as, himself unseen, a wild-wood Actæon, he watched her rising naked from her woodland bath. We also, glancing for a moment, may in fancy see some such substantial figure, flecked with leaf-shadows, and unabashed, as was made immortal three hundred years afterwards in Albrecht Dürer's glorious engraving of the Adam and Eve, that beatification of the Teutonic Venus.

At this point we meet with the first of those invectives against ‘my lady Fortune,’ ‘Frou Sælde,’ which become so common. He begins to feel his lack of wealth and his uncertain position very irksome and painful, and he blames Fortune for his ill-luck with his mistress, who in spite of all is still ‘not dear, or very dear, but the dearest of all.’ It furthermore appears that the object of his affections is not known to the world; it was a kind of duty with sensitive lovers to conceal their lady's name, and he complains that people flock round him, and tease him to tell them. But he will give way at last, and let them know. This lady, then, has two names—the one of them is Grace, but the other is Churlishness; and so he leaves them as wise as they were before. There follows then a declaration couched in words of the most modern tone and feeling. He tells us that a man of honour, a knight, a gentleman in fact, should respect all women, but should keep his deepest reverence for the best. Not those, necessarily, which have the most beauty, for beauty is but an adornment of goodness; and then, confessing that his mistress treats him ill, yet he cannot regret being a servant of love, for he says that a man knows no more than a child what life means if he never loved a woman. Next we have a charming pastoral vignette. He is sitting in the fields, and meditating on his love; he determines to try the oracle. So he takes a long stalk of knot-grass, and pulls it asunder, joint by joint as children do, to see if she will love him or love him not. He begs us ‘do not laugh!’ for the answer is favourable, and he is so hopeless that even that affords him some little consolation. Presently we find him, in true Renaissance spirit, kneeling in supplication to ‘Frouwe Minne,’ Venus, our Lady of Love, that she will shoot an arrow into the hard heart of his mistress. It is difficult to imagine how it was possible that these long-winged interchanges of homage and disdain, to prosecute which

Men must have had eternal youth,—
          Or nothing else to do,

as Mr. Austin Dobson flippantly but pertinently says, could be pursued without much ennui. The sense of the ridiculous was very slightly developed in the early mediæval times, many proofs of which might be adduced from Walther's poems, and from none more than the next we come to among the ‘minnelieder,’ which I translate as being at the same time very short and a curiosity in subject and metre:—

                                        Queen Fortune throws her gifts around,
                                                  But turns her back on wretched me;
                                        No place for pity hath she found,
                                                  And what to do I cannot see;
                                                            To me to turn she will not deign,
                                        And if I run around, I find her turned again.
                                                            She pleases not to see me ever,
I would her eyes stood in her neck, so must she see me then for
                                                                                all her wild endeavour.(10)

The abnormal length of the last line is of not unfrequent occurrence in these poems, and points to some peculiarity in the melody to which they were sung, for in all cases the metre was arranged to suit the tune, not the tune composed for the words.

A fresh group of more humoristic ‘minnelieder’ opens with a whimsical piece of petulance direct against his lady. All her honour comes from having so great a poet to sing her glory, and if she will not favour him he will sing no more, and her fame will be forgotten. Then with a curious impetuous outburst that is half-comic, half-savage, he hopes that if she refuses him, and takes a young man when she is gray, that her lusty husband may revenge her first poet-lover by ill-treating her, and by whipping her old hide with summer saplings. The next is more fantastic still, full of curses on the winter, queer jokes about the ill-fortune of hearing the ass and the cuckoo on an empty stomach, and ends up by addressing his mistress as Hiltegunde. It has been supposed from this that that was her name; but, on the whole, considering the etiquette of the times, which, as we have seen, forbad a knight to reveal his lady's name, it is more likely that it is a play on his own name in connection with the popular romance of ‘Walther and Hildegunde.’ A little later we are assured that the Emperor, probably poor young Heinrich VI., presently about to die in Sicily, would gladly turn music-maker for a kiss of her red lips. Passing one or two similarly conventional lyrics, we come to one song of a far fresher kind, one that made Walther famous at once, and which ought to endear his name and memory to every German, the first clear note of high patriotic unity, a hymn in praise of Germany and German beauty. One verse in particular has often been quoted by modern critics as curiously anticipating the famous national song ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?’ of Ernst Moriz Arndt:—

                    From Elbe river to the Rhine,
And back again all round to Hungary,
          'Tis the best, this land of mine;
The best of all the world, it seems to me.
                    If I can judge what's fair,
                    In body or in face,
So help me God, no ladies have such grace
                    As German women bear.(11)

Whether this declaration of public feeling softened his Hiltegunde's heart or not, at all events we find him soon on terms of familiarity with her, called by her ‘frîunt’ and ‘gesëlle’ (lover and comrade), and calling her in return ‘frîundîn’ and ‘frouwe mîn’ (darling and wife). With this song and with that quoted above, in which, for her sake, he forgives the winter, the series of ‘minnelieder’ closes.

The verses of his later days breathe a spirit of morbid and petulant melancholy that is very sad to meet. He lived long enough to see the decline of art, and to hear the cry that poetry was dead. Walther deplores with much bitterness the loss of courtly popularity. The world whom he has served and still would serve has left him, he tells us, to listen to young fools. The garlands of the world have missed him, and the blossoms faded; the very roses have fallen apart and left only thorns. Virtue has lost its power, beauty its magic, in these sad days. In short, he mourns, like Asaph of old, that the wicked should flourish as a green bay-tree, while he is poor and an outcast. In one of these later poems, however, we come upon a single example of a brighter mood. It begins with the old depression. He is in utter despair; life is not worth living; all men do evil, and that is the fault of the women. So far all is gloomy, but at the mention of the last word he pauses, and reproves himself for speaking evil of women. He has no right to carp at others because life is dark to him, and the piece ends by his saying, ‘Then I will live as best I may, and give out my song.’ But he is soon as miserable as ever. Love likes the stalwart limbs of young Four-and-twenty better than the wise bald head of Three-score. The Lady of Love has gone crazed after young fools, and heeds not him nor his songs. Art is at a low ebb, morality is dead, and at last he says farewell to the world altogether.

There is little pleasure in following him through this period of morbid and atrabilious discontent, a Byronic disease of the mind far enough removed from that melancholy of Leopardi or Shelley, which is deeply poetic in spite of its weakness. We lose in it all trace of the joyous singer who had been unable, in his youth, to lead off even a piece of juggling nonsense about a crow and an old woman, without a prelude of such bubbling Chaucerian sweetness as this:—

When summer came to pass,
And blossoms through the grass
Were wonderfully springing,
And all the birds were singing,
I came through sun and shadow
Along a mighty meadow,
In midst of which a fountain sprang,
Before a woodland wild, that rang
With songs the nightingale outsang.(12)

We have seen that he awoke from this intellectual paralysis which was creeping over him, under the excitement of the pietistic revival, and wrote some superb fresh sacred lyrics under the personal influence of St. Elizabeth of Hungary. We have seen, too, that the rousing of the embers was but a flash, and that the end was near. The life of trouble was to find rest in the cloistered silence of Würzburg. Thus we have traced the man and the poet through his life and his work to the same point of conclusion.

Notes

1. It is perhaps not generally known that the race of meistersingers has been extinguished only in our own day, and that there is still alive, at the age of over eighty, at Ulm, a grave-digger named J. Best, who is absolutely the last survivor of the last guild of meistersingers in Germany. This guild was dissolved in 1839.

2. Appendix BB [in Gosse, Edmund W. Studies in the Literature in Northern Europe].

3. Appendix CC.

4. Appendix DD.

5. Appendix EE.

6. Appendix FF.

7. Appendix GG.

8. Appendix HH.

9. Appendix II.

10. Appendix JJ.

11. Appendix KK.

12. Appendix LL.