found to
anything like the same extent in only two known writers, the Italian
Dante and the Englishman Langland; while if he is immensely Dante's
inferior in poetical quality, he has at least one gift, humour, which
Dante had not, and is far Langland's superior in variety and in
romantic charm. He displays, moreover, a really curious contrast to
the poets already mentioned, and to most of the far greater number not
mentioned. It is in Wolfram first that we come across, in anything
like noticeable measure, that mastery of poetical mysticism which is
the pride, and justly the pride, of the German Muse. Gottfried and
Hartmann are rather practical folk. Hartmann has at best a pious and
Gottfried a profane fancy; of the higher qualities of imagination
there is little or nothing in them; and not much in the vast crowd of
the Minnesingers, from the chief "nightingale" Walther downwards.
Wolfram, himself a Minnesinger (indeed the term is loosely applied to
all the poets of this time, and may be very properly claimed by
Gottfried and Hartmann, though the former has left no lyric), has left
us few but very remarkable _aubades_, in which the commonplace of the
morning-song, with its disturbance of lovers, is treated in no
commonplace way. But his fame rests on the three epics, _Parzival_,
_Titurel_, and _Willehalm_. It is practically agreed that _Parzival_
represents the flourishing time, and _Willehalm_ the evening, of his
work; there is more critical disagreement about the time of
composition of _Titurel_, which, though it was afterwards continued
and worked up by another hand, exists only in fragments, and presents
a very curious difference of structure as compared both with
_Parzival_ (with which in subject it is connected) and with
_Willehalm_. Both these are in octosyllables: _Titurel_ is in a
singular and far from felicitous stanza, which stands to that of
_Kudrun_ much as the _Kudrun_ stanza does to that of the _Nibelungen_.
Here there are none but double rhymes; and not merely the second half
of the fourth, but the second half of the second line "tails out" in
the manner formerly described. The consequence is, that while in
_Kudrun_ it is, as was remarked, difficult to get any swing on the
metre, in _Titurel_ it is simply impossible; and it has been thought
without any improbability that the fragmentary condition of the piece
is due to the poet's reasonable discontent with the shackles he had
imposed on himself. The subst