The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries

odels and inspirations for all after time, who has appreciated what it succeeded in doing for the education of the classes and of the masses, the higher education being provided for at least as large

ature interested this surprising people. One is almost sure to think at the first moment of consideration that the literature will not be found worthy of the other achievements of the times. In most men's minds the Thirteenth Centur

assic modern literature, comprising a series of immortal works in prose and poetry, were initiated by the contemporaries of the makers of the {167} universities and the builders of the Cathedrals. If we stop to think for a moment it must be realized, that generations who succeeded in expressing themselves so effectively in other departments of esthetics could scarcely be expected to fail in literature alone, and they did not. From the Cid in Spain, through the Arthur Legends in England, the Nibelungen in Germany, the Minnesingers and

and the beginning of the Thirteenth Century. Italian Gothic has the principal characteristic peculiarities of the architectural style which passes under the name developed to a remarkable degree, and yet its finished product is far distant from any of the three other national forms that have been mentioned, yet is not lacking in a similar interest. Spanish Gothic has an identity of its own that has always had a special appeal for the traveler. Any one who has ever visited the shores of the Baltic sea and has seen what was accomplished i

he great originals of the North of France. As a matter of fact, the assertion of national characteristics, far from destroying the effectiveness of Gothic, rather added new beauties to this style of architecture. This was true even occasionally when mistakes were made by architects and designe

even when similar subjects, as for instance the Graal stories, are treated from nearly the same standpoint by the two Teutonic nations, the Germans and the English. Parsifal and Galahad are national as well as poetic heroe

pp

MINERVA (ROME'S

ed Spanish ballad would have very little of interest for modern readers, and yet there are very few scholars of the past century who have not been interested in this literary treasure. Critics of all nations have been unstinted in their prais

cuss the Nibelungen Lied. A half a century ago or more the fashion of the critics for insisting on the divided authorship of such poems was much more prevalent than it is at present. At that time a great many scholars, following the initiative of Wolf and the German separatist critics, declared even that the Homeric poems were due to more than one mind. T

a discretion which argues a single artistic intelligence. The first part closes with the marriage of the hero's daughters; the second with the shame of the Infantes de Carrion, and the proud an

ts, that there has been even some doubt of his existence expressed, but that he {170} was a genuine historical character seems to be clear. Many people will recall the Canons' argument in the forty-ninth chapter of Don Quixote in which Cervantes, evidently speaking for himself, says: "That there was a Cid no one will deny and likewise a Bernardo Del Carpio, but that they performed all the exploits ascribed to t

efore their breasts, wi

and heads bent down

d high of heart the

our was born, his cla

clang of arms is hea

en! Strike home for

Bivar is here-Ru

Bermuez still maint

own they come, their p

ed Moors to earth,

three hundred more, as

see the lances ris

and riven mail, to se

ent in snow-white

g riderless, the

hamed, and 'St. James!

on in it at least. He had killed in fair fight the father of a young woman, who being thus left without a protector appealed to the king to appoint one for her. In the troublous Middle Ages an heiress was as likely to be snapped up by some unsuitable suitor, more literally but with quite as much haste, as in a more cultured epoch. The king knew no one whom he could trust so well with the guardi

altar the bride an

mena the Cid stretc

confusion: 'Thy

ut face to face, my

a man I slew, a m

ead father, a hus

ll liked the man, ap

astilian his state

ure of the parting of Hector and Andromache, though there is more naive self-consciousness in the work of the Spanish bard, than in that of his more artistic colleague of the Grecian olden times. There is particularly a famous picture of the duties of noble ladies in Spain of this time and of the tender solicitude of a father for his daughter

l, se?ora, he sai

ach other our lov

nce never may sta

g commandeth the

guide thee, thou

rom thee, let none

ll wisely, and tend

woe and death wit

ly dresses unti

s absence let wives

hy daughters, nor

d the danger becaus

us innocence. At h

the daughter is at

servants, with str

and friendly, and wel

letters, thy best

they also may gu

ey bring thee, and

hers, with thy dau

, Jimena, the trum

then he mounts the s

it does from that crude period at the end of the Twelfth Century when such minute psychological observation as to young folks' ways would be little expected, and least of al

ated is not very clear, though it seems most likely that the original inspiration came from Celtic sources. These old ballads, however, had very little of literary form and it was not until the end of the Twelfth and the beginning of the Thirteenth Century that they were cast in their present mold, after having passed through the alembic of the mind of a great poetic and literary genius, which refi

been best summarized by Mr. Henry Morley, the late Professor of Literature at the University of London, whose third volume of English writers contains an immense amount of valuable information with regard to the literary history, not alone of England at this time but practically of all the countries o

e of the St. Graal as an introduction to the series, and shortly afterwards Walter Map added his Quest of the Graal, Lancelot, and Mort Artus. The way for such work had been prepared by Geoffrey of M

y; and there is all this in the St. Graal. There is a theory, too, of the sacrifice of the mass, an explanation of the Saviour's presence in the Eucharist, that is the work, he says, of the loftiest and the most brilliant imagination. These were not matters that a knight of the Twelfth Century would dare to touch. They came from an ecclesiastic and a man of genius. But if so, why should we refuse credit to the assertion, repeated in every MS. that they were first written in Latin? The earliest MSS. are of a date not long subsequent to

tics who have made special studies in these earlier literary periods. Prof. George Saintsbury, of the University of Edinburgh, for instance, in the second volume of Periods of English Literature, [Footnote 18] has been quite unstinted in his praise of this early Englis

George Saintsbury, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in t

pretension to decide. Whoever did it, if he did it by himself, was a great man indeed-a man second to Dante among the men of the Middle Age. Even if it was done b

passage states his firm conviction that the man who created Lancelot was one of the greatest literary inventors and sympathetic geniuses of all times, and that his work is de

egend, and one of the greatest in all literature,

dsome, and like

f the great novelists of the world, and one of the greatest of them. If it was some unknown person (it could hardly be Chrestien, for in Chrestien's form the Graal interest belongs to Percevale, not to Lancelot or Galahad), then the same compliment must be paid to that person unknown. Meanwhile the conception and execution of Lancelot, to whomsoever they may be due, are things most happy. Entirely free from the faultlessness which is the curse of the classical hero; his une

centered more in the depth of humanity that there is in the stories, than in the poetic details for which they themselves have been responsible. In succeeding generations poets have often felt that these stories were so beautiful that they deserved to be retold in terms readily comprehensible to their own generation. Hence Malory wrote his Morte D'Arthur for the Fifteenth Cent

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istence, even the most trivial. He had his likes and dislikes, he seems to have had some disappointed ambition that made him rather bitter towards ecclesiastics, he seems to have had some unfortunate experiences, especially with the Cistercians, though how much of this is assumed rather than genuine, is hard to determine at this modern day. Many of the extremely bitter things he says with regard to the Cistercians might well be c

has been set down somewhat indefinitely as between 1190 and 1220. Most of the work was undoubtedly accomplished after the beginning of the Thirteenth Century and in the form in which we have it at present, there seems to be no doubt that much was done after the famous meeting of the Meistersingers on the Wartburg-the subject of song and story and music drama ever since, which took place very probably in the year 1207. With regard to the Nibelungen Lied,

icism in all branches of literature over the whole Teutonic race during the Nineteenth Century. English admiration for the poem began after Carlyle's introduction of it to the English reading public in his essays. Since this time it has come to be ver

loss of interest in him with the passage of time, the citation

ones, where, in gay dancing melodies, the sternest tidings are sung to us; and deep floods of sadness and strife play lightly in little {179} purling billows, like seas in summer. It is as a meek smile, in whose still, thoughtful depths a whole infinitude of patience, and love, and heroic strength lie revealed. But in other cases too, we have seen this outward sport and inward earnestness offer grateful contrasts, and cunning excitement; for example, in Tasso; of whom, though otherwise different enough, this old Northern Singer has more than once reminded us. There too, as here, we have a dark solemn meaning in light guise; deeds of high temper, harsh self-denial, daring and death, stand embodied in that soft, quick-flowing joyfully-modulated verse. Nay farther, as if the implement, much more than we might fancy, had influenced th

of simplicity and a sympathetic human interest all its own but that reminds one more of Homer than of anything else in literature, and Homer has faults but lack of interest is not one of them. From the very beginning the story of the young man who does not think he will marry, and whose mother does not think that any one is good enough for him, and of the young woman who is sure that no one will co

mhild's character, and the incomparable series of battles between the Burgundian princes and Etzel's men in the later cantos-cantos which contain the very best poetical fighting in the history of the world-far more than redeem this. The Nibelungen Lied is a very great poem; and with Beowulf (the oldest but the least interesting on the whole), Roland (the most artistically fi

it because of its relation to the Wagnerian operas. Even those who know the fine old German poems only passingly, will yet realize the supreme genius of their author, and those who need to hav

bstructures, were to be of the greatest {181} influence in the development of the human mind, and yet were to remain practically always within the limits of thought and feeling that had been traced by these old fou

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