were confined to the simplicity of the ancients, we should never attain that primitive strength which distinguishes them, and we should lose those intimate and multiplied emotions of which our souls are susceptible. Simplicity in the arts would, among the moderns, easily degenerate into coldness and abstraction, while that of the ancients was full of life and animation. Honor and love, valor and pity, were the sentiments which distinguished the Christianity of chivalrous ages; and those dispositions of the soul could only be displayed by dangers, exploits, love, misfortunes-that romantic interest, in short, by which pictures are incessantly varied. The sources from which art derives its effect are then very different in classic poetry and in that of romance; in one it is fate which reigns, in the other it is Providence. Fate counts the sentiments of men as nothing; but Providence judges of actions according to those sentiments. Poetry must necessarily create a world of a very different nature, when its object is to paint the work of destiny, which is both blind and deaf, maintaining an endless contest with mankind; and when it attempts to describe that intelligent order, over which the Supreme Being continually presides, that Being whom our hearts supplicate, and who mercifully answers their petitions!

The poetry of the pagan world was necessarily as simple and well defined as the objects of nature; while that of Christianity requires the various colors of the rainbow to preserve it from being lost in the clouds. The poetry of the ancients is more pure as an art; that of the moderns more readily calls forth our tears. But our present object is not so much to decide between classic and romantic poetry, properly so called, as between the imitation of the one and the inspiration of the other. The literature of the ancients is, among the moderns, a transplanted literature; that of chivalry and romance is indigenous, and flourishes under the influence of our religion and our institutions. Writers, who are imitators of the ancients, have subjected themselves to the rules of strict taste. alone; for, not being able to consult either their own nature or their own recollections, it is necessary for them to conform

to those laws by which the chefs-d'œuvre of the ancients may be adapted to our taste; though the circumstances both polit ical and religious, which gave birth to these chefs-d'œuvre are all entirely changed. But the poetry written in imitation of the ancients, however perfect in its kind, is seldom popular, because, in our days, it has no connection whatever with our national feelings.'

1 "A few words on this much-talked of school may not be unacceptabie. Like its offspring, L'Ecole Romantique in France, it had a critical purpose which was good, and a retrograde purpose which was bad. Both were insurgent against narrow critical canons, both proclaimed the superiority of Medieval Art; both sought, in Catholicism and in national legends, meanings profounder than those current in the literature of the day. In other respects these schools greatly differed. The Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis, and Werner, had no enemy to combat in the shape of a severe national taste, such as opposed the tentatives of Victor Hugo, Dumas, and Alfred de Vigny. On the contrary, they were supported by a large body of the nation, for their theories only carried further certain tendencies which had become general. Thus in as far as these theories were critical, they were little more than jubilates over the victorious campaigns won by Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller. The Schlegels stood upon the battle-field, now silent, and sang a hymn of victory over the bodies of the slain. Frederick Schlegel, by many degrees the most considerable critic of this school, began his career with an Anthology from Lessing's works: Lessing's Geist; eine Blumenlese seiner Ansichten; he ended it with admiration for Philip the Second, and the cruel Alva, and with the proclamation that Calderon was a greater poet than Shakspeare. Frederick Schlegel thus represents the whole romantic school from its origin to its close.

"Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Solger, are the philosophers of this school; from the two former came the once famous, now almost forgotten, principle of 'Irony,' which Hegel' not only disposed of as a principle, but showed that the critics themselves made no use of it. Indeed, 'he only serious instance of its application I remember, is the ingenious ssay by Schleiermacher on the 'Irony of Sophocles,' translated for the Classical Museum by the present Bishop of St. David's. No one, not even Tieck, attempted to exhibit the 'irony' of Shakspeare, the god of their idolatry. Among the services rendered by Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, the translation of Shakspeare must never be forgotten, for although that translation is by no means so accurate as Germans suppose, being often niserably weak, and sometimes grossly mistaken in its interpretation of the meaning, it is nevertheless a translation which, on the whole, has perhaps no rival in literature, and has served to make Shakspeare as familiar to the Germans as to us.

The French being the most classical of all modern poetry, is of all others least calculated to become familiar among the lower orders of the people. The stanzas of Tasso are sung by the gondoliers of Venice; the Spaniards and Portugese, of all

"In their crusade against the French, in their naturalization of Shakspeare, and their furtherance of Herder's efforts towards the restoration of a ballad literature, and the taste for Gothic Architecture, these Romanticists were with the stream. They also flattered the national tendencies when they proclaimed 'mythology and poetry, symbolical legend and art, to be one and indivisible,'1 whereby it became clear that a new Religion, or at any rate a new Mythology, was needed, for 'the deepest want and deficiency of all modern Art lies in the fact that the artists have no Mythology.'2

"While Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher were tormented with the desire to create a new philosophy and a new religion, it soon became evident that a Mythology was not to be created by programme; and as a Mythology was indispensable, the Romanticists betook themselves to Catholicism, with its saintly legends and saintly heroes; some of them, as Tieck and A. W. Schlegel, out of nothing more than a poetic enthusiasm and dilettanteism: others, as F. Schlegel and Werner, with thorough conviction, accepting Catholicism and all its consequences.

'Solger had called Irony the daughter of Mysticism; and how highly these Romanticists prized Mysticism is know to all readers of Novalis. To be mystical was to be poetical as well as profound; and our critics glorified mediæval monstrosities because of 'their deep spiritualism,' which stood in contrast with the pagan materialism of Goethe and Schiller. Once commenced, this movement rushed rapidly onwards to the confines of nonsense. Art became the handmaid of Religion. The universal canon was laid down (and still lingers in some quarters), that only in the service of Religion had Art ever flourished,-only in that service could it flourish. Art became a propagande. Fra Angelico and Calderon suddenly became idols. Theory was bursting with absurdities. Werner was proclaimed a Colossus by Wackenroder, who wrote his Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, with Tieck's aid, to prove, said Goethe, that because some monks were artists, all artists should turn monks. Then it was, men looked to Faith for miracles in Art. Devout study of the Bible was thought to be the readiest means of rivalling Fra Angelico and Van Eyck; a hair-shirt was inspiration. The painters went over in crowds to the Roman Church. Cornelius and Overbeck lent real genius to the attempt to revive the dead forms of early Christian art, as Goethe and Schiler did to revive the dead forms of Grecian art. Overbeck, who painted in cloister, was so thoroughly penetrated by the ascetic spirit, that he refused to draw from the living model, lest it should make his works toc naturalistic; for to be true to Nature was tantamount to being false to the

ranks, know by heart the verses of Calderon and Camoëns. Shakspeare is as much admired by the populace in England as by those of a higher class. The poems of Goethe and Bür ger are set to music, and repeated from the banks of the Rhine to the shores of the Baltic. Our French poets are admired wherever there are cultivated minds, either in our own nation, or in the rest of Europe; but they are quite unknown to the common people, and even to the class of citizens in our towns,

aigher tendencies of spiritualism. Cornelius, more of an artist, had too much of the artistic instinct to carry his principles into these exaggerations; but others less gifted, and more bigoted, carried those principles into every excess. A band of these reformers established themselves in Rome, and astonished the Catholics quite as much as the Protestants. Cesar Masini, in his work Dei Puristi in Pittura thus describes them: 'Several young men came to Rome from Northern Germany in 1809. They abjured Protestantism, adopted the costume of the Middle Ages, and began to preach the doctrine that painting had died out with Giotto, and to revive it, a recurrence to the old style was necessary. Under such a mask of piety they concealed their nullity. Servile admirers of the rudest periods in Art, they declared the pigmies were giants, and wanted to bring us back to the dry hard style and barbarous imperfection of a Buffalmacco, Calandrino, Paolo Uccello, when we had a Raphael, a Titian, and a Correggio.' In spite of the exaggerations of these admirers of the Trecentisti, in spite of a doctrine which was fundamentally vicious, the Romanticists made a decided revolution, and they still keep the lead in painting. Whatever may be thought of the 'German School,' it must be confessed that until Overbeck, Cornelius, Schadow, Hess, Lessing, Hübner, Sohn, and Kaulbach, the Germans had no painters at all; and they have in these men painters cf very remarkable power.1

"Such was the new school and its doctrine. Raphael is not more antagonistic to Fra Angelico, Titian is not more antagonistic to Albert Durer, than Goethe and Schiller were to the hectic Novalis and the dandy Schlegel. Nevertheless, it is certain that their culture of Reflection on the one hand, and of Imitation on the other, aided the Romantic movement more than their own works and strivings retarded it. That movement has long come to a stand-still in literature, and its judgment has been pronounced; but with much obvious mischief it brought many obvious advantages, and no student of modern literature will refuse his acknowledgment to the services rendered by Romanticism in making the Middle Ages more thoroughly understood."-(Lewes, Goethe's Life and Works, vol. ii. pp. 216–220.)-Ed.

1 Our own Pre-Raphaelite School is a child of the Romantic School. Success is Assured by the genius of Millais and Hunt, in spite of the theoretical doctrines they maintain, and by their fidelity to Nature; in this latter respect they are the opposite: of the Romanticists.

because the arts, in France, are not, as elsewhere, natives of the very country in which their beauties are displayed.

Some French critics have asserted that German literature is still in its infancy. This opinion is entirely false; men who are best skilled in the knowledge of languages and the works of the ancients, are certainly not ignorant of the defects and advantages attached to the species of literature which they either adopt or reject; but their character, their habits, and their modes of reasoning, have led them to prefer that which is founded on the recollection of chivalry, on the wonders of the middle ages, to that which has for its basis the mythology of the Greeks. Romantic literature is alone capable of further improvement, because, being rooted in our own soil, that alone can continue to grow and acquire fresh life: it expresses our religion; it recalls our history; its origin is ancient, although not of classical antiquity.

Classic poetry, before it comes home to us, must pass through our recollections of paganism: that of the Germans. is the Christian era of the fine arts; it employs our personal impressions to excite strong and vivid emotions; the genius. by which it is inspired addresses itself immediately to our hearts, and seems to call forth the spirit of our own lives, of all phantoms at once the most powerful and the most terrible.

CHAPTER XII.

OF GERMAN POEMS.

FROM the various reflections contained in the preceding thapter, I think we must conclude that there is scarcely any classic poetry in Germany--whether we consider it as imitated from the ancients, or whether by the word classic we merely understand the highest degree of perfection. The fruitful im agination of the Germans leads them to produce, rather than