f lies,
equivocations, and perjuries in which his lovers hide their passion;
without ever seeming to guess at the pathos and nobility of the man and
the woman who are the mere trumpery obstacles or trumpery aids to their
amours. He heaps upon Tristram and Yseult the most extravagant praises:
he is the flower of all knighthood, and she, the kindest, gentlest,
purest, and noblest of women; he insists upon the wickedness of the
world which is for ever waging war upon their passion, and holds up to
execration all those who seek to spy out their secret. Gottfried is most
genuinely overcome by the ideal beauty of this inextinguishable
devotion, by the sublimity of this love which holds the whole world as
dross; the crimes of the lovers are for him the mere culminating point
of their moral grandeur, which has ceased to know any guilt save
absence of love, any virtue save loving. And so serene is the old
minnesinger's persuasion, that it obscures the judgment and troubles the
heart even of his reader; and we are tempted to ask ourselves, on laying
down the book, whether indeed this could have been sinful, this love of
Tristram and Yseult which triumphed over everything in the world, and
could be quenched only by death. That circle of hell where all those who
had sinfully loved were whirled incessantly in the perse, dark, stormy
air, appeared in the eyes even of Dante as a place less of punishment
than of glory; and, especially since the Middle Ages, all mankind looks
upon that particular hell-pit with admiration rather than with loathing.
And herein consists, more even than in any deceptions practised upon
King Mark or any ingratitude manifested towards Brangwaine, the
sinfulness of Tristram and Yseult: sinfulness which is not finite like
the individual lives which it offends, but infinite and immortal as the
heart and the judgment which it perverts. For such a tale, and so told,
as the tale of Gottfried von Strassburg, makes us sympathize with this
fidelity and devotion of a man and woman who care for nothing in the
world save for each other, who are dragged and glued together by the
desire and habit of mutual pleasure; it makes us admire their readiness
to die rather than be parted, when their whole life is concentrated in
their reciprocal sin, when their miserable natures enjoy, care for,
know, only this miserable love. It makes us wink with leniency at the
dishonour, the baseness, the cruelty, to which all this easy virtue is