Page:The Spirit of French Music.djvu/166

 German people in ancient and modern versions or adaptations; also romances of the Breton cycle translated or adapted as far back as the middle ages by German writers such as Wolfram of Eschenbach and Gottfried of Strasburg. These are the sources from which Wagner drew the subjects of his dramas, except that work of his youth, Rienzi. These subjects were very much in vogue in German literature in the days of his youth. The taste with which they inspired him was nothing new, it was the prevailing taste of the time. The most marked feature of this period of German literature, the period which followed Goethe and is by general agreement called the romantic period, was a great vogue for the old national literature, a great zeal for its revival. And it was not only Germany's historians, students and philologists who devoted themselves to this undertaking. Her poets, romance-writers and dramatic authors contributed to it in their own way by themselves taking from this distant source the plots and characters of their fictions. Tieck, Lamotte-Fougué, Hoffman, Novalis, Immermann, Heine, to say nothing of a legion of obscure authors, dealt with all Wagner's subjects before Wagner. They told or sang of the Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Tristan, Parsifal, Siegfried. "There were in existence," says the learned H. Lichtenberger, "a crowd of tragedies on the Nibelungen." Thus Wagner the poet is not an independent or isolated phenomenon. He belongs to the literary school of German romanticism which covers the first half of the nineteenth century.

The works of his first period, the Phantom Ship, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin constitute as regards their inspiration and their form a distinct group in the